Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction

Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific

Popular imaginings of the Pacific Islands as earthly paradises or escapes for the weary have obscured the long historical reality of violence—cultural, physical, environmental, and political—under the European and U.S. empires that sought out these islands of Oceania as one of the last frontiers. Today, islanders are writing back. In Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific, Susan Y. Najita proposes that the traumatic history of contact and colonization has become a crucial means by which indigenous peoples of Oceania are reclaiming their cultures, languages, ways of knowing, and political independence. In particular, she examines how contemporary writers from Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Aotearoa/New Zealand remember, re-tell, and deploy this violent history in their work. As Pacific peoples negotiate their paths toward sovereignty and chart their postcolonial futures, these writers play an invaluable role in invoking and commenting upon the various uses of the histories of colonial resistance, allowing themselves and their readers to imagine new futures by exorcizing the past. Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific is a valuable addition to the fields of Pacific and Postcolonial Studies and also contributes to struggles for cultural decolonization in Oceania: contemporary writers’ critical engagement with colonialism and indigenous culture, Najita argues, provides a powerful tool for navigating a decolonized future. Susan Y. Najita is an Assistant Professor in English and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Postcolonial literatures

Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. The series will also include collections of important essays from older journals, and re-issues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Lyn Innes or Rod Edmond at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature. The series comprises three strands. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new research intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include: 1 Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye Brenda Cooper 2 The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 3 Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style Denise deCaires Narain 4 African Literature, Animism and Politics Caroline Rooney 5 Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition Tobias Doring 6 Islands in History and Representation Edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith 7 Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922 Anindyo Roy 8 Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: “A Hot Place, Belonging To Us” Evelyn O’Callaghan

9 Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body Michelle Keown 10 Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction Sue Kossew 11 Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence Priyamvada Gopal 12 Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire Terry Collits 13 American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination Paul Lyons 14 Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction Susan Y. Najita Postcolonial Literatures makes available in paperback important work in the field. Hardback editions of these titles are also available, some published earlier in the Routledge Research strand of the series. Titles in paperback include: Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique Benita Parry Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye Brenda Cooper The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style Denise deCaires Narain Readings in Postcolonial Literatures offers collections of important essays from journals or classic texts in the field. Titles include: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris edited by Andrew Bundy

Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific Reading history and trauma in contemporary fiction

Susan Y. Najita

First published 2006 by Taylor and Francis Inc 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Susan Y. Najita This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Najita, Susan Y. (Susan Yukie) Decolonizing cultures in the Pacific : reading history and trauma in contemporary fiction / by Susan Y. Najita p. cm.—(Routledge research in postcolonial literatures ; 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Pacific island fiction (English)—History and criticism. 2. Decolonization in literature. 3. Indigenous peoples in literature. 4. Oceania—In literature. 5. Hawaii—In literature. 6. New Zealand— In literature. 7. Samoa—In literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR9645.N35 2006 823ʹ.9209358099—dc22 2006008370 ISBN 10: 0–415–36669–0 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0–203–01940–7 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978–0–415–36669–4 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–203–01940–5 (ebk)

For my mother and father And for Toby

Contents

List of figures Preface Notes on pronunciation and terms Introduction: toward a decolonizing reading praxis “Messing with” geography: re-siting the local 3 Contexts and comparisons 7 Decolonization and cultural practice 11 Beyond and before hybridity: indigeneity, place, and multiple, ongoing colonization 13 Fictions of traumatic history: intertextuality and decolonization 15 Unpacking the disciplines and recuperating the popular, everyday—a method for reading 22 1

2

Trauma and the construction of race in John Dominis Holt’s Waimea Summer Reclaiming a violent past: contact and the “ethnographic uncanny” 31 The shape of history: masking and adultery. Gothic novel or traumatic realism? 39 Kauikeaouli, Lono, and pleasure 43 Pi‘o practices 44 Dispossession and the Māhele 46 Multiple dialectics of race and gender 47 Recounting the past, telling new futures: Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree and the “tropical” cure Fanua and the plantation system 64 Colonial infantilization of orators 72 O le Mau: exile, imprisonment, and dis-ease 80 Playing the wild card: reclaiming orality 89

xi xiii xvii 1

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64

x 3

Contents “Fostering” a new vision of Maori community: trauma, history, and genealogy in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People Sexual economy and the land 101 Disciplining the body: penal transportation and evangelicism 108 New genealogies out of the old 116 Dismantling discourses: psychoanalysis, history, and the novel 121

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“Talking in circles”: disrupting the logic of property in Gary Pak’s The Watcher of Waipuna 130 Class alliances against development: Kalama and Waiāhole-Waikāne 132 Magic realism and the critique of liberal ideology 137 Marginalization and the law 142 The oral/aural logic of “talking stink” 150

5

Making Pakeha history: familial resemblances in Jane Campion’s The Piano Woman, reproduction, and the nation 159 Resemblances 163 Differences: history and the fetish 174

156

Epilogue Oppositional reading: decolonizing praxis 182

180

Notes Glossary References Index

186 199 204 220

Figures

0.1 0.2 0.3 1.1

World map Aotearoa/New Zealand, Samoa, Hawai‘i map Pacific-centred world map Krao as pictured in The Living Races of Man

2 4 6 52

Preface

Growing up in Hawai‘i in the 1970s and 1980s was full of contradictions. While as public school students we were reading mostly canonical British and American literature, all around us—in the re-birth of Hawaiian music and culture and in the community struggles against development—we saw every day people refusing assimilation and the liberal ideal. After studying in Hawai‘i and the mid-West, I returned to teach American Literature in the public schools. This was just the beginning of my education. My students taught me what I had always known: the incongruity in Hawai‘i of curricula that assume the flow of civilization and culture from the East (coast) westward. This narrative was an imperial one indeed in which Hawai‘i and the islands of the Pacific did not figure. I began to yearn for a curriculum written from the perspective of my students, most of whom were of either Hawaiian or Asian ancestry and had been, like me, born and raised in Hawai‘i. In the early 1990s, I was inspired by Pacific Islands writers and found that comparisons and resonances between various locations in the Pacific helped me to understand what had been occurring in Hawai‘i for some time. Life is full of ironies. Today, I teach students in the midWest who come to this material with radically different interests and curiosities than those in Hawai‘i. Nevertheless, when they discover the stories behind the glossy images of tourist paradise, I find their sense of outrage and injustice cause for hope. I offer these readings as a contribution to struggles for decolonization in Oceania with the hope that these texts’ critical engagement with colonialism and indigenous culture will help us navigate a decolonized future with eyes wide open. This book engages with the false promises of the post-colony: though independence is a reality for many, true decolonization has not occurred. Social, cultural, and political colonial hierarchies, values, and epistemologies find a continued existence within the new nation. Decolonizing Cultures brings this postcolonial perspective to bear on locations of emergent decolonization in the Pacific both as an intervention and as cause for hopeful celebration. It deploys a comparative method that re-connects archipelagoes long separated by imperial boundaries and proposes a reading praxis that engages with the traumatic histories of the nation: empire and the postcolonial nation. Decolonization begs the following questions: How can we address the imperial disavowal of the traumas

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of contact, western law, and native dispossession? What does the postcolonial nation do with these histories of violence? To what ends are narratives of trauma put? And, how do the answers to these questions allow for a critical perspective on the nation while also acknowledging it as a privileged mode by which indigenous peoples achieve recognition as sovereign entities or at international venues such as the United Nations? How might this critical nationalism allow for new modes of belonging that circumvent the pitfalls of the nation? My first words of gratitude go to friends and colleagues who have read with patience, dedication, and a critical eye portions of the manuscript in its various forms. I thank Maurizia Boscagli, María Cotera, Phil Deloria, Vicente Díaz, Lincoln Faller, Simon Gikandi, Sandra Gunning, Carl Gutíerrez-Jones, Anne Herrmann, June Howard, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Arlene Keizer, Pam Sachi Kido, Rachel Lee, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Gary Pak, Damon Salesa, Sarita See, Sidonie Smith, Paul Spickard, Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, Steve Sumida, Teresia Teaiwa, Rob Wilson, and Patsy Yaeger. I would like to thank my colleagues in Asian/ Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan for their valuable insights and critiques: Phillip Akutsu, Vicente Díaz, Stuart Kirsch, Scott Kurashige, Emily Lawsin, Damon Salesa, Sarita See, and the amazing scholar who brought us all together, Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman. I am also indebted to the writers who generously gave of their time and energy in allowing me to interview them for this project. To Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Gary Pak, and Albert Wendt: This work would not be possible in the most basic sense without you. May the body of Pacific Islands literature that you have worked to establish continue to thrive and grow. To the many friends who have extended their warmth and encouragement over the years, thanks go to Noelani Arista, Sarah Blair, Tina Delisle, Liz Deloughrey, Gaurav Desai, Auli Ek, Michelle Elleray, Juniper Ellis, Jonathan Freedman, Lisa Kahaleole Hall, Tiffany Herard Willoughby, Seri Luangphinith, Nadine Naber, Ifeoma Nwankwo, Bert Ortíz, Adela Pinch, Yopie Prins, Aurora Reynoso, John P. Rosa, Jenny Salesa, María Sánchez, Jeanne Scheper, Andy Smith, Sina Vai‘a, and Andrea Zemgulys. To Liz Thompson, my editor at Routledge, I owe a debt of gratitude for having the vision and courage to support scholarship on the Pacific, and for believing in this book. Thanks also to Polly Dodson, Carole Drummond, Diane Parker, Eileen Power, and Katherine Sheppard for their valiant persistence and unflagging concern. To Brenda Cooper and the anonymous reader for the press, I am profoundly grateful for your careful readings and critiques. To my mother and father, words fail to express my love and gratitude. Your love for the place you come from has led me to this work. Through your example, you have shown me what matters most. To Joan, Julie, and Don, thanks for showing me that this path is not so hard or long, and for helping me up when I fall. And to Toby most of all, whose generosity, patience, and abiding love have sustained me through the writing and much more. I have been fortunate to receive institutional support from the University of California. A fellowship from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center allowed

Preface xv me to begin research on this topic, and the Pacific Rim Research Fellowship funded research and travel in the region. I also thank Tobin Siebers and the participants in the Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for allowing me time and space to complete this book. Portions of chapter one on Holt’s Waimea Summer appeared in Cultural Critique, winter 2001. Versions of chapter five on The Piano appeared in ARIEL, volume 32, issue 1 in 2001 and in Complicities: Connections and Divisions, edited by Chitra Sankaran, Rajeev Patke, and Leong Liew Geok, published by Peter Lang in 2003.

Notes on pronunciation and terms

Pronunciation Vowels in the Hawaiian (‘ōlelo Hawai‘i), Māori (te Reo), and Samoan languages are pronounced as follows a “ah” e “eh” i “ee” o “oh” u “oo” Diacritical markings include the macron and the glottal stop. The macron above a vowel (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) lengthens and adds stress. The glottal stop (indicated by ‘) is similar to the sound between the syllables “uh-oh.” In Samoan the “g” is pronounced as “ng.” In Māori the “wh” is a voiceless consonant. It is pronounced by emitting the breath sharply between the lips. Note: in the following chapters, I indicate the macron and glottal stop for pronunciation purposes. However, I respect quoted passages which did not originally include the diacritical markings. For definitions of key terms in the Hawaiian, Maori, and Samoan languages, see the glossary.

Terms When referring to the indigenous people of Hawai‘i, four terms are used in this book to reflect historical and legal usage. “Hawaiian”—(1) the legal term that emerges out of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920. It refers to those persons possessing less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778. (2) in everyday usage a term used to refer to all persons of indigenous ancestry. “native Hawaiian”—the legal term established under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 (HHCA) which reads “any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778.”

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Notes on pronunciation and terms

“Native Hawaiian”—I use this term to refer to all persons of indigenous ancestry. The use of upper-case “Native” is meant to draw a distinction between the racialized use of “native” in terms of blood quantum under the HHCA. “Kānaka Maoli”—the literal meaning is “true or real person.” Hawaiians used this term to refer to themselves prior to 1778 and after. It is increasingly being invoked as a more politicized substitute for the term “Hawaiian” (Blaisdell 2000).

Introduction Toward a decolonizing reading praxis

Most maps of the world position western Europe, the Americas, and the Atlantic Ocean at its center (see Figure 0.1). In this imaginary schema, the Pacific Islands are tiny points on the margins, outlying areas to the Americas and to Asia, separated by the literal margins of the page which situate the islands as simultaneously west of the American “West” and east of “the East.” The islands are also divided by arbitrary divisions of time, whole days in the case of Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga where the International Date Line cuts a boundary between island groups that have had a long history of cultural exchange. They are further divided by the imperial claims, past and present, of European and American powers that sought their outlying possessions in the “last frontier.” But Pacific Islanders have not always accepted these fragmented and discontinuous images of the region they inhabit. As Epeli Hau‘ofa has pointed out in his seminal essay “Our Sea of Islands,” the tradition—ancient and contemporary—of canoe voyaging in Oceania presents an entirely fluid set of relations between islands: “Oceania” connotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants. The world of our ancestors was a large sea full of places to explore, to make their homes in, to breed generations of seafarers like themselves. People raised in this environment were at home with the sea. They played in it as soon as they could walk steadily, they worked in it, they fought in it. They developed great skills for navigating their waters, and the spirit to traverse even the few large gaps that separated their island groups. Theirs was a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers. From one island to another they sailed to trade and to marry thereby expanding social networks for greater flow of wealth. They travelled to visit relatives in a wide variety of natural and cultural surroundings, to quench their thirst for adventure, and even to fight and dominate. (1995b: 92) This long-lived tradition of voyaging and navigation and its recent revival provide a foundation for developing a comparative framework for understanding the histories and cultures of the Pacific.1 Unlike the contradictory and discontinuous

Figure 0.1 World map

Introduction

3

image proffered by world maps and imperial knowledge, the Pacific has always been, in some sense, suited to comparative approaches. Indeed, this book explores the decolonizing potential of comparative study by examining three locations in Polynesia: Aotearoa/New Zealand, Samoa, and Hawai‘i (see Figure 0.2, p. 4). These places have fallen traditionally within the national/imperial terrains of British Commonwealth Studies, American Studies, and Pacific area studies. Crossing these disciplinary and national boundaries allows one to reconnect island groups through their shared pre-contact cultures as well as their similar and different experiences of colonization.2 Comparisons across cultural and geographical boundaries imposed by the colonizer or excolonizer offer a means to mirror at the level of research and academic inquiry the reinvigoration of the Oceanic imaginary already occurring at the level of cultural and everyday practice. Allow me to provide one such example from Hawai‘i.

“Messing with” geography: re-siting the local Eh, howzit brah, I heard you goin mainland, eh? No, I goin to da continent. Wat? I taught you goin San Jose for visit your bradda? Dats right. Den you goin mainland brah! No, I goin to da continent. Wat you mean continent brah?! Da mainland is da mainland, dats where you goin, eh?! Eh, like I told you, dats da continent— Hawai‘i is da mainland to me. Joseph P. Balaz, “Da Mainland to Me” In Joseph Puna Balaz’s anthem to the “local,” “Da Mainland to Me,”3 the speaker insists in pidgin (Hawai‘i Creole English) that his inquisitive friend attend to the semantic differences between the terms “mainland” and “continent.” What is at

Figure 0.2 Map of Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Samoa, and Hawai‘i

s

Australia

Indonesia

Palau

Papua New Guinea

Guam

Northern Mariana Is.

New Zealand

Norfolk I.

New Caledonia

Vanuatu

Solomon Is.

Nauru

Marshall Is.

Wake I.

Fiji

Tuvalu

Tonga

Jarvis I.

Niue

Kiribati

Hawai‘i

Cook Is.

American Samoa

Samoa

Tokelau

Howland I.

Johnston Atoll

French Polynesia

Introduction 5 stake in the speaker’s insistence on Hawai‘i as “mainland”? While the speaker’s re-centering of Hawai‘i as his main cultural and geographical reference point destabilizes the U.S. continent in imagining the geography of Hawai‘i, the term “mainland” also suggests important differences in imagining not only location but size, relationality, and the valuation of terra firma. As The Oxford English Dictionary’s listing of definitions suggests, “mainland” signifies the privileging of large, bounded bodies of land: “[t]hat continuous body of land which includes the greater part of a country or territory, in contradistinction to the portions outlying as islands or peninsulas.” Here, “mainland” receives its boundedness via its difference from small, discontinuous bodies—islands and peninsulas— as well as from fluid, shifting ones—the sea: “land as opposed to sea, terra firma.” The examples the OED provides are strikingly different from Hawaii’s actual relation to the continental U.S. Examples of the mainland include British Columbia as opposed to Vancouver Island, Australia as opposed to Tasmania, the South Island of New Zealand as opposed to the North Island, mainland China as opposed to Taiwan. What is striking about these examples is their physical proximity in contrast to Hawaii’s very distant relation (more than 2,000 miles) to the continental U.S. In fact, Hawaii’s so-called physical proximity provided the justification for cession. The 1897 Treaty of Annexation, put forth by white planters who overthrew Queen Lili‘uokalani, argued for the geographic and economic “dependence” of the islands on the U.S.4 The treaty attempts to naturalize Hawaii’s status as colony by yoking the discourse of trade with geography. This discursive coupling helps to produce the fraudulent justification for cession. If the term “mainland” establishes the central reference of value as terra firma, the term “continent” also contains this valuation, as it is listed as a synonym: “Continuous land, mainland,” “[t]he land as opposed to the water,” “terra firma.” Again, the OED observes the fairly close (by comparison) proximal relation between the mainland of Europe as “the Continent” in contrast to the British Isles. But, as Balaz’s astute speaker insinuates, the term “continent” implies the idea of a “containing agent or space,” “that which is contained.” In fact, the most telling definition of “continent” attempts to contain the U.S. within its own history as itself a colonial site: “Applied, during and immediately after the War of Independence, as a collective name for the revolting colonies (which ultimately became the United States).” The irony of the term “mainland” lies in its effacing the former colonial (continental) status of the U.S. The term further naturalizes U.S. colonial relations with Hawai‘i (and other Pacific Islands) in attempting to deny the fact that Hawai‘i is not an offshore island with a long history of organic geographical, historical, and cultural ties to the continental U.S. Furthermore, the poem’s deployment of the term “continent” contests the imagining of land as extensive and boundless, a valuation which produces phenomena of colonization such as “the frontier”; and the term thereby establishes the locus of value in systems of relationality, the sea—like Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Oceanic imaginary—that bounds continents and the speaker’s “mainland” as the space through which

Figure 0.3 Pacific-centered world map

Introduction 7 relations between cultures are negotiated. For the Oceanic is precisely the excess to which the poem in its insistence on continental terms silently refers. The decolonizing politics of Balaz’s poem redefines Hawaii’s relation to the North American U.S. and thereby allows us to reposition the islands in relation to other Oceanic imaginaries, other Pacific geographies. For this reading of Balaz’s poem asks us to consider how the experience of colonization in places such as Hawai‘i can be better understood in relation to the history, culture, and colonial experiences of its longstanding cultural neighbors, other island groups such as Samoa and New Zealand whose cultural and genealogical affi liations extend to the early migrations from central Polynesia more than a millennium ago. If anything, Hawaii’s connection as island to U.S. “mainland” is merely accidental; the U.S. “mainland” receives its status only by figuring its distant possessions as “just off the coast” of California.5 Native Hawaiian or Kānaka Maoli6 struggles for sovereignty and self-determination must be understood in relation to the experiences and struggles of other indigenous Pacific peoples.7 This comparative project, thus requires resituating the Pacific at the center (see Figure 0.3). It also asks that we look through and beyond the imperial claims of colonizers who not only carved up the Pacific but produced knowledges about the places they sought to control. The study of the Pacific poses peculiar problems because of its decentered rhizomatic geography, its myriad cultures and languages, and most of all, its history of multiple and different (neo)colonizations that have produced a region that does not fall neatly within the paradigms of American Studies, Commonwealth Studies, or Pacific Studies. This decentered geography is largely the result of the islands’ history of being divided among imperial powers (among them Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, and the U.S.). Archipelagoes, such as Samoa, Hawai‘i, or the Marianas, have often been divided between colonizers or colonized several times over, producing a layered history of colonization. Furthermore, the political status of island groups can range from independent, postcolonial nations, to semi-independent federations, to territories, colonies, and states. The recent move within American Studies toward an international or postnational model has brought about the incorporation of ethnic studies within American Studies.8 Rob Wilson’s Reimagining the American Pacific (2000) is an example of this New Americanist trend. However, while Wilson deft ly surveys “local” culture in Hawai‘i, his volume does not examine indigenous issues. By looking at interactions between native cultures and the complex layering of U.S., British, German, New Zealand, and Japanese colonialisms within a Pacific system, the current study offers to extend work on the American Pacific as well as scholarship on Atlantic systems such as the Black Atlantic and studies that observe the intersections between British and U.S. cultural studies.9 Recent work in Atlantic systems challenges the privileging of U.S. and European metropoles in Paul Gilroy’s transnational model (1995) by looking at the contributions of the Caribbean. While Gilroy’s model focuses on U.S. diasporic and antinationalist identities in relation to the formation of modernity, my approach

8

Introduction

is island-centered, concerned with indigenous nationalisms and claims to land, and with postcoloniality, especially the relation between the nation and its false promise of modernization and development. In addition, the indigenous cultural nationalist awakenings in these places have drawn upon other efforts at decolonization in similarly marginalized locations in the Asia-Pacific or the “Pacific Rim,” including some within Latin America, and have also influenced reciprocal imaginings of newly-emergent or yet-to-emerge independent and sovereign entities.10 The island-centered nature of this work makes us re-think the histories of Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Aotearoa/New Zealand—places that share cultural and linguistic linkages that predate western contact—in relation to one another as opposed to in exclusive relation to colonizers and ex-colonizers. As a result, this work challenges the paradigm of Commonwealth Studies which privileges the history of Britain’s imperial past. The contemporary Pacific works examined here look toward present remedies and future possibilities by making connections that supersede Commonwealth ties, connections with other postcolonial sites that transcend the former colonial relationships. Like Hau‘ofa whose voyage from Fiji to Hawai‘i leads to his brilliant reinvocation of the Oceanic imaginary, these writers are imagining across imperial boundaries and re-establishing cultural and genealogical connections impeded by the imperial carving up of the Pacific. Cultural crossings and dialogues, then, are part of a re-imagining of their region through, but ultimately beyond, the colonial past.

Contexts and comparisons But what is the historical basis for this comparative method? Let us look briefly at some of the similar and different experiences of colonization and reconciliation. In Aotearoa/New Zealand the now-disputed loss of Maori tribal sovereignty in the nineteenth century intersects with white British settlement and French colonial interest. The program of “Systematic Colonisation” organized by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the New Zealand Company in the late 1830s sought to resolve the problem of overproduction and declining profits in the metropole by exporting surplus labor and capital to the new colonies. The New Zealand Company’s objective was to establish a government charter similar to that of the East India Company that would allow for a corporate-administered colony. They would profit by purchasing land cheaply from Maori and selling high to settlers and absentee investors. French claims on New Zealand began with figures such as Bishop Jean-Baptiste Pompallier who established the fi rst Roman Catholic mission in 1838 at Hokianga and the French adventurer Baron Charles de Thierry who amassed 800 acres in the Northland in 1837. French religious and settler claims were contested by Protestant missionaries who advocated that New Zealand become a British colony or protectorate. The Waitangi Treaty and claims for full British control over New Zealand were attempts to rein in the New Zealand Company’s premature purchase of Maori land and to pre-

Introduction 9 clude French claims to the South Island (Belich 1996: 187). The founding of “instant townships” by the Company and its affiliates produced by mid-century the major cities of Auckland, Otago, Canterbury, Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, Dunedin, and Christchurch. But New Zealand was also itself a colonizer in its own right, taking possession of Western Samoa from Germany during World War I until Samoan independence in 1962. The rise of Germany as an imperial power in the Pacific must be seen in relation to British and U.S. attempts to protect white settler interests and to carve out their own domains. In the series of civil wars in the late nineteenth century, European powers deployed their naval forces and played native factions against each other for their own interest in establishing European laws and controls over the settler town of Apia. The most obvious example of this tactic was the Treaty of Berlin (1889) which established Samoa as a condominium controlled by Germany, Britain, and the U.S. By 1899, the lack of a workable resolution to the decades-long civil wars led to the division of the islands between the U.S. and Germany. The U.S. navy, interested in the deep-water harbor of Pagopago, took possession of Tutuila and Manu‘a island groups and continued to administer them until after World War II. Today, American Samoa remains an unincorporated territory of the U.S. and is administered by the Office of Insular Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior. In contrast, the islands of Upolu and Savai‘i of Western Samoa were taken to protect and further the interests of the German plantation company Deutsche Handels und Plantagen-Gesellschaft der Südsee Inseln zu Hamburg (DHPG). These histories of multiple colonization require comparisons across imperial fields as well as between archipelagic sites, the island responses to these colonial imperatives. As the fiftieth U.S. state, Hawai‘i is usually viewed as having little connection to British and Commonwealth colonial and postcolonial studies. Yet this official image of Hawai‘i hides its long and ongoing history as a colonial site produced out of the layering of British, French, Japanese, and U.S. imperial claims. Like many other Pacific archipelagoes, the history and effects of colonialism in Hawai‘i can be understood best through a comparative method that moves beyond a U.S.-centered mode of analysis, beyond an exclusive relation to its current colonizer. For example, in order to understand white American oligarchic power that seized the islands in 1893, one must also invoke the prominent British interest in the islands and the Hawaiian monarchy’s emulation of and appeal to its British counterpart. The coup perpetrated by Lord George Paulet with the help of HMS Carysfort in 1843 ousted Kamehameha III from the throne. Had it not been for British repudiation of Paulet’s actions and the subsequent restoration of the king to the throne by Admiral Richard Thomas five months later, the Hawaiian Islands would be today a possession of Britain. Likewise, the rivalry between imperial powers becomes even more apparent when Lili‘uokalani escorted Queen Kapi‘olani to England to honor Queen Victoria at her Jubilee in 1887. She returned to find that the Bayonet Constitution that severely limited monarchical powers had been forced upon her brother, King David Kalākaua, at gunpoint by U.S. advisors. In her account of these events, she is careful to fore-

10

Introduction

ground Victoria and England’s acknowledgment of the Hawaiian monarchy’s sovereign status in contrast to brash American encroachments.11 Years later, pro-U.S. justifications for the overthrow of Lili‘uokalani called attention to the undemocratic nature of monarchical rule. Thus, the overthrow of the monarchy and subsequent annexation were billed as a “revolution” which freed Hawaiians and foreigners alike from the “oppressive” nature of monarchy, even though at the time the queen possessed little political power as a result of the changes wrought by the Bayonet Constitution. Her proposal to return political voice to the Hawaiian citizenry through a new constitution instigated the events of the overthrow itself. The history of rivalry between colonial powers, then, produces a complex picture of the means by which the islands became a U.S. territory. Other important points of comparison and contrast between these three archipelagoes include their establishment as colonies, the questions of settlement and imported labor, and contemporary attempts at reconciliation. Both New Zealand and Western Samoa were colonized under government-sponsored charter systems. While this system actually prevented Samoa from becoming a white settler colony, it produced the opposite effect in New Zealand. In this regard, New Zealand and Hawai‘i are perhaps more similar in being societies where non-natives far out-number the indigenous population—Europeans in the case of the former; whites and descendants of immigrant laborers in the case of the latter.12 After the coup of 1893, Hawai‘i was controlled by a white planter oligarchy composed of former missionaries and their families. The “legitimization” of colonial rule, represented in the Treaty of Waitangi, the annexation of Hawai‘i, as well as German plantation control over Western Samoa are points of contestation by native independence and sovereignty movements in these locations. Though colonial settlement in New Zealand occurred primarily through European settlers who gradually displaced Maori from their ancestral lands, Samoa remained populated primarily by Samoans, though the DHPG did import Chinese and Melanesians as plantation laborers subject to separate laws and controls. Nevertheless, village structures of governance, to a large degree, remained operative. Hawaii’s planter elite also imported foreign laborers to work their sugar and pineapple plantations, though to a greater degree, such that by annexation in 1898, haole (foreigner, often white American) elite and immigrant laborers outnumbered the native Hawaiian population which declined due to foreign diseases. Today, Samoa is an independent postcolonial nation, while Hawai‘i remains both a state and a colony of the U.S. Though there have been several congressional attempts to legislate a nation-within-a-nation relationship similar to that of Native American tribes, the Akaka Bill is still considered a highly controversial proposal by many Native Hawaiians. Official recognition of the fraudulent nature of the Treaty of Waitangi and Maori ancestral claims to Aotearoa, in contrast, might be seen as occupying a middle ground of compromise, not in any way complete decolonization but a biculturalism that recognizes and attempts to right historical wrongs. The works in this study must be read in relation to these very different political and historical contexts.

Introduction 11 But in all cases, colonization has paved the way for global capitalism which controls to a large degree the economies and means of production in the region. “Foreign” investment in and ownership of hotels, golf courses, and other forms of touristic entertainment continue to effect environmental, cultural, and physical destruction of what are also indigenous spaces. In Hawai‘i U.S. military control and occupation of culturally significant lands (such as Mākua Valley and Pōhakuloa) continues despite the return of the island of Kaho‘olawe to the State of Hawai‘i in the early 1990s. Nuclear weapons testing in French Polynesia, nuclear waste on Bikini Atoll, chemical weapons disarmament on Johnston Atoll, proposed golf resorts on and near Hawaiian Homes Land and sacred sites are just some of the ways in which colonialism and neocolonialism are alive and well in the Pacific. If in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Asians emigrated to Hawai‘i in search of better lives and economic opportunity only to be disillusioned by the racial and economic exploitation of the plantation system, the reality in Hawai‘i today is that East Asian nationals perpetuate a subtler form of economic and cultural exploitation. As HaunaniKay Trask points out, land and water use, public policy, and the law are shaped by the ebb and flow of the tourist industry. The resulting environmental damage that destroys once-sacred sites extends to cultural degradation in the tourist industry, its “garish ‘Polynesian’ revues, commercial ads using [Hawaiian] dance and language to sell vacations and condominiums.” Trask declares, “The inundation of foreigners decrees marginalization in our own land” (1993: 3).13 Since the end of the eighteenth century, some of the devastating effects of colonization for Native Hawaiians have included (and continue to include) disease, depopulation, destruction and decay of spiritual and cultural practices and beliefs, and loss of control over lands and waters, all of which are intimately connected.14 In the cases of many indigenous peoples such as Native Hawaiians and the Maori of Aotearoa, the outlawing and delegitimation of native languages led to further cultural alienation and devastation by weakening the cultural, emotional, and psychic links from one generation to the next. Both Maori and Native Hawaiians have withstood the outlawing of native languages and fought for their reinvigoration. In Aotearoa the rigorously enforced Native Schools Act of 1867 which decreed English the only language of education for Maori children was only recently lifted in 1987 by the Maori Language Act which also established the Kohanga Reo National Trust. Similarly, only since 1986 has the 1896 banning of the Hawaiian language from schools been lifted. Early grassroots Maori movements in the 1970s such as the Land March on parliament, Bastion Point and Raglan occupations, annual protests to Waitangi Day celebrations, and the anti-apartheid protests to the 1981 Springbok Tour have brought about the recognition of Maori as a bicultural partner with quasi-sovereign rights in relation to Pakeha New Zealand. (“Pakeha” means “foreigner” but refers more commonly to New Zealanders of European descent.) But even as Maori are constantly renegotiating the relation between their iwi (tribe) and the government, New Zealand’s forests, utilities, telecommunications, and transportation systems

12

Introduction

are being targeted by foreign investment and the free trade regimes of the AsiaPacific Economic Conference (APEC). Maori have recently also had to address a radical conflict in worldviews: the threat of biopiracy and genetically modified organisms which constitute not only a theft of taonga (treasured possessions) but also a tampering with Maori genealogy (as Maori relation to the natural world is reckoned in terms of familial descent).15 Western Samoa, despite being one of the first Pacific Island nations to achieve independence in the 1960s, continues to be plagued by foreign control of the economy and resources by East Asian and Australasian multinationals, corrupt native elites, and uneven modernization. With its single most important financial source in the form of overseas remittances, Samoa comes under the category of what social scientists have termed “MIRAB societies”—microstates dependent on migration, remittance, aid, and bureaucracy with no real means for economic productivity.16 Samoa has survived the nightmare of colonialism only to be dumped into the shark pond of global capital.

Decolonization and cultural practice So, how have contemporary cultural forms contested the effects of colonization, neocolonization, and globalization on indigenous Pacific Islanders? This book is about the importance of the local and the everyday in such cultural formations. In the works of contemporary writers and fi lmmakers John Dominis Holt, Albert Wendt, Keri Hulme, Jane Campion, and Gary Pak, the local is a site of both invasive exploitation as well as popular resistance to official nationalism and its economic partner, global capital. These popular nationalisms contest and oppose the uneven and inequitable political, economic legacy of colonialism and more recent global restructuring.17 While the failure of the “nation” continues to haunt us in the post-World War II period,18 the cultural nationalisms examined here offer their critical perspectives on the nation even while they invoke indigenous efforts toward social redistribution in the forms of self-determination and sovereignty. These narratives display their self-critique of cultural nationalism in their oblique, fragmentary representations of the traumatic history of European and American contact and colonization. The magic realism of Albert Wendt and Gary Pak both celebrates and critiques the nation. While their oral forms retell the stories of popular resistance that ground anticolonial nationalism, generational and genealogical structures (in the western sense of biological descent) reveal the family to be the metaphor for national belonging and inscribe a linear, teleological trajectory of nation formation. In contrast, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and John Dominis Holt’s Waimea Summer are examples of what I call “traumatic realism”19 whose subject is not so much the history and emergence of the postcolonial nation as it is the history of ongoing colonization under empire. Rather than appearing as foreclosed, the traumatic colonial past resurfaces in fragments precisely because they continue to constitute not only lived reality but also genealogical (dis)continuity. Unlike any number of postcolonial novels which comment retrospectively on a colonial relation that has formally “ended,”

Introduction 13 in traumatic realism the present is still being determined to a large extent by unresolved and disavowed injustices. These writers and cultural practitioners are crucial figures in the recent “renaissance” of indigenous and islander culture that coincided with movements for decolonization. For example, Albert Wendt, probably the single most influential figure in Pacific literature, emerged in the early 1970s as one of the major initiators and nurturers of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society and the journal Mana. Keri Hulme, perhaps the Maori writer with the widest international readership, is a major contributor to the Pacific literary scene. Fluent in Te Reo (the Maori language), Hulme is an active member of her Kai Tahu iwi in the South Island. Likewise, Native Hawaiian writer John Dominis Holt’s profound knowledge of Hawaiian culture has earned him the title of “father of the Hawaiian Renaissance.” A “local” writer of Korean descent, Gary Pak remains active in local struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism in Hawai‘i. Pak is representative of a particular segment of local, Hawai‘i-born writers, though not of native descent, who engage with the issues of native sovereignty. Because of their topical nature, these works should be contextualized both within specific political, historical moments and within the broader context of Pacific cultural production. The works by Campion and Hulme examined here are written primarily amid calls for recognition of Maori as a bicultural partner. However, their responses are very different. As a counter-example to others in this study that explore indigenous nationalisms, Campion’s fi lm examines the emergence of white settler nationalism via the appropriation of key narratives of Maori cultural nationalism. In contrast, Hulme’s The Bone People—written prior to Maori negotiations with the Crown in the 1990s—imagines a bicultural mode of belonging based on the shared oppressions of boy convicts and native Maori. Hulme is a contemporary of Maori writers Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera who also explore in their fiction the questions of colonial resistance and recognition. Grace’s novels such as Potiki and Baby No-Eyes and Ihimaera’s The Matriarch, The Dream Swimmer, and The Whale Rider recount the popular memories of resistance to colonial domination, tourist development, biopiracy, and nuclear testing. All three authors interweave historical documents, genealogy, oral tradition, and testimony into their fictional representations of actual historical moments of resistance. In the case of The Matriarch and The Dream Swimmer, the author reclaims from the colonial archive, popular memory, and the watery world of transgenerational dreams the competing stories about the colonial past. Aesthetic strategies are central to these reflections on resistance, from Ihimaera’s fantasy and magic realism to Grace’s multiply-voiced narratives. Recent work such as Robert Barclay’s Melal, as well as Hulme’s Te Kaihau/The Windeater also are part of this ongoing engagement with the traumatic past— whether it be nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands or the legacy of settlement in Aotearoa. Wendt’s fiction, written entirely in the postcolonial period, critiques both German and New Zealand colonialism as well as native elite corruption and the nation’s false promise of modernization. Wendt, who grew up in Samoa and New

14

Introduction

Zealand, lives in Auckland and Honolulu, and thus can also be considered part of a diasporic group of writers whose younger generation includes Sia Figiel and John Pule. In novels such as Sons for the Return Home, Ola, and Black Rainbow, Wendt depicts Pacific Islanders in transit, establishing new connections based on shared genealogies. Like Grace’s novel Cousins, which details the stories of four sisters and their daughters, Figiel’s novel They Who Do Not Grieve deploys storytelling across generations and national boundaries to strengthen genealogical connections within the islander diaspora. The diasporic connections Figiel invokes tell a truer story than those told in the colonial ethnographies of anthropologists such as Margaret Mead. In contrast to this more postcolonial sensibility, Holt and Pak write under colonial conditions. Holt’s novel, written after statehood, is set during the early years of the Territorial Period, its colonial policies of racialization and dispossession. Pak’s work is written during the post-statehood period amid early calls for the recognition of Native Hawaiian sovereignty. His work, like that of other local writers such as Milton Murayama, Rodney Morales, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, R. Zamora Linmark, and Lisa Linn Kanae, engages the effects of U.S. military presence, plantation colonialism, and multinational capitalism on both natives and non-natives. Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories, in its explicit critique of these structures and its detailing of popular resistance, resonates most with Morales’s recent novel When the Shark Bites which unearths perhaps one of the most traumatic moments in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, the disappearance of George Helm, Jr., the charismatic leader of the Protect Kaho‘olawe Ohana.20 But beyond the authors’ cultural and political prominence, my analysis of their works intervenes in debates about history, trauma, and identity in the wake of the Holocaust and other genocides by engaging with one of the founding strands of postcolonial studies, the psychology of colonization.21 By bringing trauma theory into dialogue with psychological theories of colonization, we can explore the challenges trauma poses as well as the productive role it might play in a decolonized national identity. Juxtaposing this eclectic set of texts allows for a Pacific-centered comparative methodology that examines connections across imperial boundaries and contemporary political formations.

Beyond and before hybridity: indigeneity, place, and multiple, ongoing colonization In contrast to current theories of postcoloniality which privilege transit between postcolonial nation and metropole, this book examines indigenous experiences of ongoing colonization and recent decolonization as grounded in place and land.22 Such an approach requires attention to the indigene’s experience of two faces of the nation: empire and anticolonial nationalism. Contemporary theorizations of identity within postcolonial studies have tended to foreground diaspora as well as the “post-ness” of the postcolonial within a history of colonization by a single imperial power. This influential strand within postcolonial

Introduction 15 studies privileges the movement from colony to metropole, ignores the indigene, and thus reveals its interest in mediating within the metropolis the marginal experiences and histories of its repressed colonial past. Postcolonial studies emerged out of the mobilization of forces external to Britain at a moment of crisis for British identity, the metropole confronting its postcolonial history as told by postwar migrants and refugees.23 One of the foremost theorizers of hybridity, Stuart Hall, foregrounds diasporic identity which can be characterized by heterogeneity, constant transformation, and creolization in which the codes of the dominant culture are appropriated by a syncretic force (1994). However, Hall’s model—like Homi Bhabha’s—is premised on a notable absence, that of the indigene (in Hall’s case, the Arawak), and this, he acknowledges, is a result of the particular historical situation in the Caribbean. While he contends that the motherland, Africa, is irretrievable for the African diasporic except through recreations of it, in the case of indigenous peoples, the motherland is an imminent presence. It remains both the ground and the object of political struggle.24 This difference and my goal of simultaneously valorizing indigenous cultures without reifying the pre-contact past problematize the degree to which one can argue that re-tellings and re-creations of the motherland are tenable. Indeed, colonial laws, modes of production, and military occupation constitute a violence that refigures relations between people and the land. The power of place, the active evocation of one’s relation to land, is an enduring aspect of indigenous Pacific Island cultures. Though people’s relation to the land changes, and though the land itself is in constant transformation, the future is always imagined in relation to “an enduring spatial nexus” (Clifford 2001: 482). Spaces are haunted by the everyday-ness of place, a palimpsest or layering of residual customs, rituals, and practices that indicate the histories of revolutions, economic and political changes, shifts in territorial boundaries (de Certeau 1988: 201–2). The indigenous figures in these works attempt survival in these conflicted places, living as the dispossessed and subalternized remnants of colonization and uneven modernization. The South Island of The Bone People is a place whose layered unofficial histories of nineteenth-century resistance resurface in the mode of traumatic history. These residual layers produce an uncanny notion of place. The shadowy presence of this unacknowledged past critiques not only imperial authority, but also colonial settler nationalism and its modern counterpart, the New Zealand state. Each of these texts in its own way also provokes a decolonized relation to land, whether it be in re-invoking connections memorialized in oral tradition, practices of stewardship or of subsistence.25 Colonial law attempts to install the liberal subject as the norm, transforming these indigenous relations to land into one of property and surplus production.26 The law becomes a traumatizing force, working to unmoor and delegitimate claims to place and the oral tradition which grounds those claims. Because the land in many parts of Polynesia is figured cosmogonically as female, the violence of the colonial liberal relation is a central problematic in decolonizing gender and sexuality. The use of land for surplus production under colonialism alters native relations to land as well as

16

Introduction

the reproductive relations between men and women. The heteronormative and familial imperative of colonialism has suppressed tribal and extended family structures, alternative sexual practices, and non-biological modes of belonging. 27 The decolonizing project involves not an unproblematic return to these practices but charting a precarious line between native gender and sexual roles, on the one hand, and the gendered and sexualized imperatives of the nation, on the other. (Nor does this project necessitate abandoning legal protections and forms of redress; to the contrary, the liberal assumptions behind colonial law are under scrutiny here.28) If theories of hybridity generally privilege movement from colony to metropole, the place-based reading strategies presented here examine the local effects of ongoing imperialism and its controversial “cure,” cultural nationalism. This book contributes to recent moves within cultural studies for regional and historically specific discussions of indigeneity.29 Many Pacific Islanders, like other indigenous peoples, remain firmly in the grip of colonialism and neocolonialism. Far from inhabiting a “postcolonial” moment, indigenous sovereignty movements in places such as Hawai‘i, Guam, or French Polynesia continue to struggle for self-determination even as this struggle is affected by diasporic migration and calls for multiculturalism. The native cultural nationalisms that emerge in these locations are situated in relation to histories of multiple colonization, and contexts of ongoing colonialism and emergent decolonization. Racialized, ethnic, and gendered identities emerge out of competing colonial interests and native traditions.30 But the complex set of relations between indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and settlers, missionaries, and convicts, on the other, suggests the way in which the very category of the “colonized” is complicated by the shifting category of “colonizer.” In other words, moving beyond a simplistic understanding of colonizer–colonized, indigene–settler, allows one to note the indigene’s changing relationship to white or European settlers, other oppressed Europeans, and to non-white immigrants and laborers. The shifting and complex nature of these interactions includes competition, oppression, exploitation, entanglement, affiliation, and alliance. This relational approach enables a critique of how settler societies appropriate indigeneity for their own legitimizing purposes, as is done in Campion’s The Piano. Re-thinking indigeneity in relational terms means also asking: How have indigenous authors engaged global cultural flows? How have western forms of the novel and its postcolonial permutations (such as magic realism) traveled along the circuits of global capital and through the markets of international fiction only to be transformed yet again? These new forms flow through Oceania and beyond along these or other routes, suggesting how indigenous culture in the Pacific is both rooted and routed (Clifford 1997). Here, translation is not so much a betrayal of the text; rather, translation allows for writers from the Pacific to read comparatively the texts of other colonial locations (not surprisingly in the colonizer’s language(s)) and to transform these reformulations.

Introduction

17

Fictions of traumatic history: intertextuality and decolonization With an ongoing history of over 200 years of colonialism, a history increasingly more literate than oral, the historical record becomes an important resource for the reclamation of indigenous cultural practices and belief systems. Yet this record is largely one produced by European and American explorers, missionaries, or businessmen and by missionary-trained native writers. This historical problem remains central to the contemporary debate about Hawaiian identity between Michigan-trained anthropologist Jocelyn Linnekin and Hawaiian Studies scholar and activist, Haunani-Kay Trask. Linnekin maintains that Hawaiian cultural nationalists, in seeking to rediscover their culture, “modeled their notions of tradition partly on their ideas about the rural community and partly on early accounts of Hawaiian society—most of these written by foreigners.” The resulting ahistorical “version” of Hawaiian-ness is one “without precedent in aboriginal Hawaiian society” (1983: 245). Trask not only questions the accuracy of Linnekin’s knowledge of “traditional” Hawaiian values but objects to her claim that the movement’s sense of “tradition” is invented. The debate, however, is more complex than I have space to outline here.31 Both arguments point to (but do not address explicitly) the destruction of almost a whole population and the delegitimation of its culture which has created a literate historical record replete with gaps and fissures, thus making the rediscovery of the past fraught with difficulty. The effect of depopulation is even greater for the oral tradition which depends upon embodied and oral transmission of genealogy, events, ritual, and so on. This is not to say that the fashioning of a popular nationalist culture is not possible or even necessary. On the contrary, the forging of such identities is necessary for political mobilization and the reclamation of lands, political voice, and self-determination. However, both Linnekin’s and Trask’s perspectives on Hawaiian identity gesture toward the possibility of either an unbroken continuity with or access to an authentic pre-contact past, both of which suggest that a coherent identity exists or is possible. Nevertheless, the literate historical record so central to the debate is one that is controversial precisely because it is overwhelmingly written by outsiders during defining moments of violent contact and colonization. In the case of Hawaiians, the moment of European and western contact, James Cook’s arrival in 1778, established the basis for the legal definition of “Hawaiian” under the 1978 State of Hawai‘i Constitution: “any descendant of the aboriginal people inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands who exercised sovereignty and subsisted in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, and which peoples have continued to reside in Hawai‘i.” As Greg Dening has argued of the Marquesas, “[t]he historical reality of traditional societies is locked together for the rest of time with the historical reality of the intruders who saw them, changed them, destroyed them. There is no history beyond the frontier, free of the contact that makes it” (1980: 42). And, as the accounts of many European explorers of the Pacific—from those of Marion du Fresne to the many accounts of Cook’s three voyages—suggest,

18

Introduction

violence has often, though not always, been the lingua franca of contact, the ultimate form of social control in a situation where cultural difference proved insufferable. The project of recuperating culture and identity in the wake of colonization, then, often involves confronting potentially traumatizing as well as alienating representations of the past not only because of the violence of contact but also because these depictions have been produced in literate form from the perspective of the colonizer. It is not surprising, then, that the history of contact and colonization resurfaces generations later in the contemporary space of the novel. The shreds and pieces of colonial history are the repressed histories of the marginalized. These histories of the indigene, of women, children, the criminalized and dispossessed are those disavowed by empire and the emergent postcolonial nation-state because they register the imposition and intrusion of the capitalist mode of production on predominantly subsistence economies. The violence enacted by this imposition and its denial provide the basis for the claim of repressed history. The process of seeking recognition for native claims—an effort to which each of these texts contributes—hinges upon the acknowledgment of this past which resurfaces on the social level in a manner akin to that of trauma. These histories erupt within these fictional texts just as trauma emerges in the present. In its classical definition, trauma is a symptom of, or delayed response to, an overwhelming event. The belated response that marks trauma includes a range of psychological effects: repeated and intrusive hallucinations, dreams stemming from the event as well as psychic numbing. Trauma also produces physical responses such as uncontrollable behaviors or increased autonomic arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event (Caruth 1995: 4). However, because the experience may not be equally catastrophic to all, trauma cannot be defined either solely by the event itself or by the personal significance a person attaches to it. Rather, the so-called pathological aspects of trauma inhere in the moment of its reception: the traumatizing event or “kernel” is not experienced fully at the time, but only “remembered” belatedly and without conscious control. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), then, is a “symptom of history,” a belated sign of an impossible history which the traumatized cannot entirely possess. The traumatized person is instead possessed by that past (4–5).32 Recent studies of victims of human rights atrocities set aside the pathologizing discourse of trauma. Here, trauma is the appropriate and sane response to what Gabriel García Márquez has termed an “outsized reality.”33 Trauma poses a particular threat to the reclamation of history, since complete recovery of the traumatic event (“kernel”) is often impossible. As the “extreme limit case” of psychoanalysis, trauma not only threatens the signifying components of language but also may bar history altogether (LaCapra 1994: 66). Hence, trauma acknowledges that reclamation may be only partial, losses may not always be made good, and wounds may never heal. These works foreground the incomplete disclosure of history. The traumatized body, through its speechless “tellings” and partial disclosure, subverts history’s linguistic, textu-

Introduction 19 alized causality. The originary events of trauma often remain unclaimed, even unclaimable, manifested only by symptoms which reflect fragments of the initial “kernel” interwoven with more recent events. However, I want to tell a story that moves through and beyond the classic one of personal psychology in which traumatic events act upon the victim/subject. The story I tell recognizes trauma as central to the nation, its histories, narrative forms, and subjects. If the exclusions of the nation (imperial and postcolonial) are grounded in the denial of colonial trauma and its disruptive effects, by returning to the discursive sites of trauma—history, the law, genealogy—we can begin to decolonize modes of belonging. Trauma intervenes in the problems of the nation, its close association with western knowledge, modernity, development, its reliance upon racial and gender exclusions, originary myths, and the production of normative subjects. The problematic of trauma—the question of what one does with it—becomes a fundamental process of decolonizing the nation. Trauma restructures narrative form, producing characters who are unable to work through their impossible histories. They refuse the developmental and socializing trajectory from child to adult of the Bildungsroman, critique the claims of psychoanalysis, and evince a politics that resists the false promise of modernization which motivates nation-formation. Perhaps the literary form most associated with the nation and subject formation remains the novel. It has been connected in a variety of ways to questions of citizenship and the imagined community of the nation as well as to forms of knowledge production: psychoanalysis, history, ethnography, and travel narrative. The Bildungsroman or novel of education has popularized the psychologization of the subject and produced the desire for correct socialization and acculturation in imperial and colonial citizenry. The historical novel has incorporated the narration of historical events and social context by resembling the descriptive and linear forms of official history. More recently, the novel has come to occupy privileged ground for the narration of marginal history. Ethnographic and travel narratives such as Cook’s journals and Melville’s Typee provided the earliest commodified and touristic depictions of the Pacific. The postcolonial novel has foregrounded through parody discourses such as history, anthropology, and the law which have produced the structures of feeling of the nation. Experiments in the novel—such as those by García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, for example—simultaneously trace the emergence of the postcolonial nation even while revealing the nation to be a constructed narrative, authored and consumed, produced and maintained (González Echevarría 1990). But the novel allows for much more than the narration and critique of the nation. It gestures toward forms that refuse and imagine beyond the nation. The Bone People, in inventing a new oral language which is constituted by and constitutive of an alternative mode of lived relations, “de-composes” the novel form, shows it to be obsolete, no longer reflective of the new mode of belonging. In all of these texts, indigenous storytelling, myth, and epistemologies reformulate the novel, making it a space to explore the politics of orality. Wendt, for example, uses the novel to comment on how oral traditions facilitate and challenge both

20 Introduction colonial and native power. Campion’s film, in its disingenuous claim to being a fi lm adaptation of a Victorian novel, allows her to comment on contemporary appropriations of Maori genealogy. Pak’s use of the long, chaptered short story for “The Watcher of Waipuna” produces a novelistic sense of local community. But his deliberate refusal of the novel form signals a resistance to incorporation within another national mode of belonging, empire. The transformation of the novel through the orally-inflected narration of traumatic history is central to what literary critics have controversially termed “magic realism.”34 One of the seldom-noted aspects of magic realism is its close connection during the post-World War I period to both the practices of surrealism and trauma theory (Zamora and Faris 1995).35 This connection is only a marginal notation in Clifford (1988) where he acknowledges that Alejo Carpentier’s connection to the surrealism movement in postwar Paris led him eventually to critique its ethnographic practices through lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real). Magic realism can be seen as a response to “discoordination,” the colliding of existing or “traditional” cultural practices and modernizing forces—such as the rationalizing forms of civil society or the nation-state; this contact gives rise to the coexistence of different historical temporalities, the result of competing and incommensurable modes of production (Lloyd and Lowe 1997: 14). The genre’s constitutive element is historical rupture, historical raw material in which disjuncture is structurally present due to the coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features (Jameson 1986: 311). The intrusion of capitalist economy and the law work together to threaten the relationship of indigenous people and their survival on the land. By placing in dialogue traumatic histories and magic realism, I propose an alternative approach to “old” cosmopolitanist models which claim that authors of magic realism remain deeply skeptical of anticolonial nationalisms and radical decolonization. Many of its widely popularized authors, such as García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Salman Rushdie, have been characterized as cosmopolitan writers who prostitute the Third World to readers in the metropole (T. Brennan 1989: 35). But this claim is not entirely accurate in all cases. As others have shown, magic realism’s parodic mode distances the reader from the voyeuristic genres of ethnography and the travel log which represented the colonized to the world and to itself from the perspective of the colonizer (González Echevarría 1990; Saldívar 1991). The genre asks readers to attend to the historical and cultural specificities the narrative may evoke for the non-metropolitan reader. It requires the western-trained reader to read differently, to distance him/herself from the touristic conventions of realism and its politics of knowing. Their resistant practices interrogate normative reading strategies, even those employed by readers of postmodern international fiction. Despite the international attention Wendt, Hulme, and Campion have received, these works remain puzzling and disconcerting for audiences not only because they challenge western epistemologies but also because they require alternative place-specific modes for understanding indigenous realities. So, while cosmopolitanist aesthetics sidestep issues of resistance and sover-

Introduction 21 eignty,36

some forms of magic realism, on the contrary, require different modes of reading sensitive to how aesthetic practices reference political and historical arguments. In this way, stylistics—and reading praxis—establish linkages between popular struggles in places defined by the geopolitics of the “Pacific Rim” and “Asia-Pacific” and the multinational capital whose interests promote such formations.37 These works evince what Pheng Cheah (1998b) has called “new cosmopolitanisms,” movements closely related to popular nationalisms whose goal is to check global capital’s control of the periphery and the comprador state.38 The various movements for global justice might be seen as establishing the beginnings of such a global political community. A place-based reading praxis which attends to the residual aspects of traumatic history may allow for a kind of readerly witnessing that facilitates social transformation. Such a project requires dismantling western discourses that promise development but only produce dependency. As Carl Gutíerrez-Jones has shown, magic realism critiques hegemonic ideologies, whether they be modes of dependency or the discourses of science, law, or anthropology (1995). Indeed, the aesthetic is less about a reality inherently “marvelous” and more about presenting the truth behind discursive constructions of “reality,” exposing the economic injustice and social repression disguised as authoritarian democracy (Alegría 1986). García Márquez’s definitive text One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) indicts the state’s collusion with transnational plantation colonialism. The law and its liberal assumptions about land, labor, property, and the individual are fundamental to legitimating this brutal mode of production and criminalizing resistance to it. Here, in response to the official scriptural quality of the law, the oral stories of popular resistance are central to magic realism’s politics of truth. Its perspective on official discourse references a Borgesian unmasking of the performative and material consequences of language, the way discourse can constitute reality. The creative (creational?) power of discourse, in this sense, is as fictive as fiction itself. When social repression facilitated by official discourse produces a reality so brutal and unassimilable that it exceeds the bounds of what we are willing to consider as not only representable but real, how does the work of art reflect it? Might not fiction take on aspects of the fantastic?39 As a discourse, might not fiction reveal the barbarity of its fictive cousin? This is what José David Saldívar means when he notes the “imaginary coherence” magic realism imposes as a means to fictively understand the “traumatic character” of contact (1991: 190); for trauma is, if anything, the effect of experiencing a reality that exceeds existing schemes for apprehending the world. If magic realism critiques the exclusions of the postcolonial nation-state, “traumatic realism” indicates a refusal of incorporation within another form of the nation: empire. Michael Rothberg (2000) defines traumatic realism as a means of engaging what he sees to be the realist, modernist, and postmodern frameworks of Holocaust history. However, I see another use for this term, one which allows us to examine the relevance of theories of trauma to colonial and postcolonial subjectivity and history. Traumatic realism characterizes how the shards of the colonial past continue to resurface in the present not as foreclosed

22 Introduction and concluded historical moments but as trauma constitutive of ongoing colonial relations. Because the web of lived relations has been partly produced under and by way of these colonial traumas and because the oppressive conditions of colonialism are not yet formally “concluded,” the everyday experiences, familial structures, and bodies are the terrain out of which the still unresolved past emerges not as completed but as a further enactment, an extension of an earlier moment. This is not a form of “acting out” which implies that the traumatic event is completed and only reenacted as a form of unconscious “remembering”; rather, the past of traumatic realism is only partly the past as the initial moment of the inscription of power extends into the present in an unbroken chain. Thus, the legacies of land dispossession, contact, and annexation are not distant, foreclosed moments in history. They emerge because they either remain disavowed aspects of ongoing colonialism and/or they continue to constitute present realities under colonization. Genealogies are central to both forms. Magic realism, in its focus on parentage and descent through the generations, comments upon what Anne McClintock has called “domestic genealogies,” the naturalization of the patriarchal family as metaphor for national belonging (1997: 90). A very different understanding of genealogy is at work in traumatic realism. Here, genealogy is invoked in its indigenous Pacific sense, connecting one not only to land and place in a very direct and embodied way but also to one’s ancestors whose deeds return in the form of one’s contemporary actions. Marshall Sahlins describes Polynesian concepts of descent in terms of a structure of cultural repetition: “Just as the father is to his sons, so the ancestor stands to his descendants as a general class to its specific instances, a ‘type’ to its ‘tokens’” (1981: 13). In this way, it is possible for an elder to narrate the doings of his ancestral lineage over many generations “in the first person pronoun,” what has been termed “the kinship I” (13–14). According to the way descent is reckoned in Maori culture, for example, the world “unfolds as an eternal return, the recurrent manifestation of the same experiences . . . If the present reproduces the past, it is because the denizens of this world are instances of the same kinds of being that came before” (Sahlins 1985: 58–59). A person, thus, re-lives the mythical past by not merely re-experiencing it but also by becoming the mythical hero. An event, then, is always a further enactment of a previous mythical event.40 Thus, the unacknowledged events of nineteenthcentury boy convict penal transportation and the sex trade in Maori women resurface in the contemporary lives of Hulme’s characters precisely because they constitute genealogy.41 This sense of genealogy presents an alternative to usual theories of trauma which focus on individual pathology. It presents a way to theorize how the traumatic past might resurface generations later along ancestral lineage. Traumatic realism also allows for a re-examination of how the margins of the historical can be inscribed within the novel form not in the modes of the nineteenth-century historical novel but as personal experience reflective of broader social and historical trauma. Thus, the seemingly individual cases of trauma do not present the opportunity for “reconstructions” of history but rather invoke the residue of history.

Introduction 23 Inhabiting both the site of discipline and decolonization, fiction mediates the impossible history of the colonized. It brings to the surface history that has faded; it loosens the unconscious so that we can begin to see the history we have repressed. This is fiction’s healing power (Bhabha 1994: 19). Indeed, it is precisely fiction’s intertextual nature—both the eruption of history as well as the re-emergence of suppressed indigenous languages and cultures within the realm of the fictive—that provides a means of negotiating the past and imagining the future. For example, while indigenous genealogies are the vehicle for the resurgence of the past, they also function as a guiding force, anchoring one to place and lighting a path for the future: the descendant stands gazing upon the past with his back to the future, “seeking historical answers for present-day dilemmas” (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 22).42 Genealogy is a living entity, enacted and transformed in everyday life. In contrast to western notions of genealogy which privilege linear descent and pedigree, Polynesian genealogies are structured loosely along the metaphor of a fishing net, invoked strategically depending on context and audience. Genealogical recounting records direct descent from parents or even multiple parentage, historical connection to specific places, as well as less formal practices invoking distant ancestral connections, relations of adoption and fostering, or even non-familial, non-biological linkages.43 In this context, how does western literate and linear genealogy—that emphasizes biological descent—function as colonial technologies of racialization? How do indigenous genealogical practices function as alternatives to these colonial technologies? How are the effects of colonization—disease, dispossession, or death—registered in genealogical discontinuity? Conversely, how do these genealogical gaps function within anti-colonial nationalism? As a mode of reclamation, orality provides a language to articulate a new mode of belonging based upon genealogy that leads out of and beyond the traumatic past (Hulme). It also provides a language of alliance based upon oral and aural modes of understanding (Pak). But, oral traditions can also appropriate. The fāgogo can perform genealogy, grafting the nationalist future on to the history of resistance (Wendt). Forms such as the fairy tale can be deployed in problematic ways to appropriate Maori genealogy in the service of a revisionist settler colonial project (Campion). The presence of the oral and the everyday within the dominant structures of knowledge-constituting discourses and the novel form represents one of the tactics used to write through and out of colonization.

Unpacking the disciplines and recuperating the popular, everyday—a method for reading Contemporary literary theory has for some time focused on the constitutive effect of language, how it produces the effect of transparency, constitutes knowledge through discourse, and shapes power and desire. It has only recently begun to produce alternative praxes which transform institutional structures of

24

Introduction

knowing. Part of such a project should be to redefine objects of literary knowledge, particularly the mode of the literate which has for some time prevailed in the distinction between “high” and “popular” cultures. Doing so disrupts the disciplinary boundaries of literature which have marginalized oral and popular forms but also allows for the extension of strategies of literary analysis to non-aesthetic discursive domains, among them the law, science, and historiography.44 Decolonizing Cultures contributes to such efforts by not only disrupting traditional literary study through attention to vernacular oral forms such as pidgin, jokes, oral genealogy, storytelling, and marginalized repressed histories of resistance, but it does so through an entirely non-traditional body of literature in the academy, the literature and culture of the Pacific Islands.45 Moreover, these works require that the critic attend to oblique references to marginalized ways of knowing which in their persistence critique the disciplinary discourses that have contributed to the subjection of the region and its peoples as objects of knowledge. Thus, I bring the critical tools of literary study to bear on other discursive terrains: that of the law in the Treaty of Waitangi, the Masters and Servants Act, the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, and penal transportation programs in Australasia; that of anthropology and early ethnographic contact narratives such as the journals of James Cook; that of historiography in the narration of imperial and official nationalist history; and that of psychoanalysis and its discourse on trauma. These discourses have also enacted forms of contact for indigenous people in these locations that have been at times both traumatizing and enabling. These disciplines have contributed to the subjection of the indigene as well as articulated indigenous modes of being in relation to community. With this goal in mind, I delineate and foreground these separate disciplinary strands as well as their popular others. Piecing out the historical, legal, psychological, anthropological, and literary as well as the everyday, popular, and oral forms within a text generated out of the indigenous Pacific requires detailed readings and sharp attention to context. Recuperating the marginalized stories of resistance to colonization and neocolonialism also requires a methodology of reading the fragments and shreds at the margins of the historical. Thus, the critic engaged in this alternative methodology reads the literary text with what I call a “side-glancing historical eye,” with an attention to the intertextual nature of the literary text, the way in which the “fictional” text, in calling upon the textuality of the supposed “real” descriptive or prescriptive languages of the law, historiography, psychology, and anthropology, places all of these disciplines within the realm of the discursive. In doing so, fiction promises to destabilize the authority of the “real,” the authority on which these disciplines claim their difference from literary texts. For these supposed “fictional” texts, in referencing actual legal and historical realities, are no longer purely fictional; likewise, the “real-ity” of the non-literary discourses is compromised by their incorporation into the space of the literary. This maneuver allows for a rupture through which a highly contextualized reading of the delegitimated forms of orality, the vernacular, the popular, and the everyday can further compromise the space of the scriptural. Thus, it is precisely fiction’s intertextuality, its capacity to address the scrip-

Introduction 25 tural, the traumatic past, and indigenous cultural formations that allows it to function as a significant terrain for the transformative potential of the Oceanic imaginary. Fiction becomes a medium for the agentive re-telling of the past and imagining of the future. Reading, in this sense, transforms. Such an approach might produce the kind of readerly witnessing that can go beyond transforming knowledge produced in the academy, within the praxes of critical analysis, and within everyday reading practices, and by doing so can help us imagine alternative futures. The chapters are organized chronologically by date of publication or release, beginning with the early examinations of indigenous identity in Holt and Wendt and going on to the more recent period of calls for native sovereignty in Hulme, Campion, and Pak. Chapter one examines the traumatic realism of Holt’s Waimea Summer (1976), specifically the traumatizing effect of laws such as the Māhele (Land Division Act) of 1848 and the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1920, both of which dispossessed Native Hawaiians while instituting a kind of legal genocide. Set in 1920s Hawai‘i, Holt’s self-published novel traces how hapa haole (half-white, half-Hawaiian) identity is shaped by these traumatizing imperatives. Not only does the legal definition of Native Hawaiian under the HHCA posit western contact and its violent consequences as historical point of departure, it also institutes a rigid notion of racial purity which conflicts with native genealogical practices. Indeed, residual practices of genealogy are the means by which the traumatic past of contact and land privatization re-emerges only to be masked under the conventions of the gothic novel. Hapa haole identity is constructed through a multiple dialectics of race and gender which is the result of competing colonial presences and native traditions. The chapter calls for a re-examination of theories of trauma within the context of human rights violations. Chapter two takes up the fictional mode of magic realism in its often ignored reinvigoration of the oral tradition and its association with anti-colonial resistance. Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979) critiques the incorporation of colonial institutions such as the church, the plantation, and western law into older Samoan practices of subsistence and chiefly authority. Struggles to maintain the authority of orator chiefs in the first half of the twentieth century resonate in the contemporary moment of the novel. Tauilo’s conflicts with his son Pepe and the orator chief Toasa suggest contrasting attitudes toward colonial rule: Tauilo’s emulation of European planters and colonial officials reveals a native complicity with colonial power, while Pepe’s rebellion against him refers to native resistance in the form of the Mau. Tauilo’s pursuit of prestige and status (a central aspect of Samoan culture) through the mimicry of colonial power is mirrored in his heir, the mysterious Galupo, who represents both the challenge of decolonization as well as Wendt’s Borgesian vision of the role of orality in legitimating the postcolonial nation. The next paired set of chapters focuses on the possibilities of alliance between natives, settlers, and immigrant-descendants. Hulme’s The Bone People (1983)

26

Introduction

emerges prior to the Crown’s settlement with the Kai Tahu iwi, and as such, imagines—out of the entangled oppressions of indigene and settler—a bicultural future in the making. The traumatic pasts of the trade in Maori women, the discipline of boy convicts, and evangelical conversion resurface in the contemporary moment in the mode of traumatic realism. Though history and psychoanalysis attempt to explain characters’ traumatic acting-out, they offer no cures. Rather, lived genealogy remains the mode by which the novel imagines a new language for a new community, one that gestures beyond the biological, reproductive nuclear family. Chapter four looks beyond the relation between indigene and white settler to examine local identity in Hawai‘i, the complex relation between Hawaiian nationalism and non-native, non-white descendants of immigrant plantation workers vis-à-vis a white settler oligarchy. Pak’s Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories (1992) examines class alliances across ethnic/racial boundaries instituted by laws—such as the HHCA, the Indolence Acts, and the Masters and Servants Act—which supported the plantation system and white elite control of lands. Pak’s magic realist strategy links local struggles against development to other locations touched by globalization. Further, Gilbert’s multiple personalities—the classic symptom of trauma—and his penchant for pidgin English (Hawai‘i Creole English) disrupt the liberal assumptions of empire and neocolonial globalization. The various threads of my argument come together in chapter five which examines the appropriation of indigeneity in legitimating contemporary white settler nationalism. Like Hulme’s text, Campion’s The Piano (1992) critiques women’s role as biological reproducers of the nation and of ethnic boundaries. Ada’s erotic autonomy undermines nationalist use of women’s bodies. However, Pakeha identity is ultimately structured by an illusionary familial resemblance between Ada and the Maori characters, on the one hand, and by her absent ancestral relation to land, on the other. Ada’s and Flora’s stories and taletelling—and the fi lm’s use of the fairy tale “Blue Beard”—foreground this absent historical relation obscured by Ada’s quasi-traumatic muteness. Ada’s piano and metal prosthetic finger act as fetishes which both cover over and refer to the violence of settler colonialism. The fi lm critiques the contemporary transformation from settler to Pakeha by foregrounding how Pakeha identity is predicated on a willful forgetting of the colonial past, a forgetting which refuses to engage with the politics of land and native sovereignty. Although cosmopolitan authors such as Rushdie are writing a half-century or more after independence, the writers foregrounded in this study are invoking the aesthetics of the popular and attempting to imagine new forms of belonging (which may or may not include some form of the nation) at a time of nascent cultural nationalist awakening or cultural nationalism that looks toward independence. While Wendt wrote Leaves of the Banyan Tree during the early years of Western Samoa’s independence, Hulme, Holt, Pak, and even Campion in her evocation of the Maori sovereignty movement have yet to see the indigenous communities they speak of achieve complete independence.46 The apocalyptic sense of disillusionment with the nation in Rushdie and García Márquez does not

Introduction 27 necessarily apply to these examples of critical cultural nationalism. These are writers—perhaps with the exception of Wendt—committed to and grounded on their ancestral lands, looking toward independence or the possibility of sovereignty, and imagining new communities and ways of belonging, and the cultural forms to express their visions. These are not the stories of national mourning but rather ongoing political work. They are imagining the future by exorcizing the past.

1

Trauma and the construction of race in John Dominis Holt’s Waimea Summer1

In contemporary discussions about the literature of Hawai‘i and its decolonization, a central problematic resulting from ongoing U.S. imperialism is the tension between genealogical and racial definitions of Hawaiian-ness. HaunaniKay Trask argues for a notion of Hawaiian based upon genealogical claims as the first people of Hawai‘i: “It is the insistence that our Native people have a claim to nationhood on Hawaiian soil that generates the ignorant and ill-intentioned response that Hawaiian nationalists are racists. In truth, Hawaiians are the only people who can claim Hawai‘i as their lāhui, or nation” (1999: 170). In this way, genealogical claims—when viewed from western perspectives of family descent and pedigree—can be taken to imply a racialized idea of ancestry. This chapter looks at the implications of these competing genealogical and biological definitions of Hawaiian-ness as they relate to nation. Genealogical and blood quantum definitions lie at the heart of the scandalous Rice v. Cayetano (2000) case in which the U.S. Supreme Court supported the claims of Big Island rancher, Freddie Rice, that Office of Hawaiian Affairs elections violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and must therefore be opened to non-Hawaiian candidates and constituency. Tellingly, both majority and dissenting decisions focused on different aspects of the legal definition of Hawaiian—each, however, defined by the moment of western contact, the arrival of James Cook. The majority decision privileged a discussion of ancestry, the more racialized aspect of the definition of “native Hawaiian” established by the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) in 1920: “any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778” (my italics). The dissenting opinion, in contrast, emphasized the 1978 State Constitution definition that amends the HHCA definition to include cultural practice and the exercise of sovereignty: “any descendant of not less than one-half part of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778, as defined by the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920 as amended; provided that the term identically refers to the descendants of such blood quantum of such aboriginal peoples which exercised sovereignty and subsisted in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 and which peoples thereafter continued to reside in Hawaii” (my italics). The majority decision stated that “race” is a “forbidden classification” since it “demeans the dignity and worth of a person” not judged on “his

Trauma and the construction of race

29

or her own merit and essential qualities,” or “unique personality,” as secured by the Constitution. Citing Hirabayashi v. U.S., a landmark decision for Japanese Americans interned during World War II, the Court denied the particular indigenous relation of Hawaiians to the federal government and cast them as a minority population seeking acceptance as American citizens: “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality” (Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81, 100 (1943)). Ancestral tracing of this sort achieves its purpose by creating a legal category which employs the same mechanisms, and causes the same injuries, as laws or statutes that use race by name. The State’s electoral restriction enacts a race-based voting qualification. By claiming an assimilationist race-blind politics vis-à-vis all minorities, the Court denied U.S. responsibility for the historical wrongs perpetrated against the Hawaiian people. The opinion thereby effaced the fact that the racialized definition of Hawaiian was created by the federal government during the Territorial Period. So, not only has the federal government defined Hawaiians racially, it now conveniently disavows the relevance of the race-based classification which it itself defined. The Court’s conflation of “race” and “ancestry,” the basis of the shocking argument that Hawaiians are a minority population similar to Japanese Americans, is strikingly similar to notions of pedigree which are the concern of this chapter. The 50 percent blood quantum definition assumes racial purity: as racial mixing continues, “native Hawaiians” as defined by blood quantum will vanish. Genealogical definitions, in contrast, valorize multiple interpersonal relations more reflective of Hawaiian notions of belonging. Genealogical recounting takes at least two major forms. The ko‘ihonua records direct, linear descent from parents or multiple parentage, while the kū‘auhau is composed of name chants (mele inoa) that record historical connection between persons and specific places as well as less formal usages. Informal practices of kū‘auhau may include relations of fostering (luhi) or adoption (hānai), extended family relations, or even nonfamilial non-biological ones.2 Such an approach implies impurity and mixing that is not a dilution but a re-territorialization reflecting the complex relations between ethnic groups in Hawai‘i (Kauanui 1998). But the contest between official U.S. definitions and indigenous self-definitions was important long before the contemporary re-emergence of the movement for Kānaka Maoli sovereignty. John Dominis Holt’s self-published novel Waimea Summer explores the implications of the racialized definition under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. Long celebrated as the “father of the Hawaiian Renaissance” and a prominent figure in the Hawaiian community, Holt was, like his fictional protagonist, partHawaiian. Holt’s family mirrors the elite social milieu of fin de siècle Hawai‘i. Holt is descended, on his maternal side, from the Bailey family of Maui, American Protestant missionaries who intermarried with chiefly Hawaiians and Spanish immigrants. On his paternal side, he comes from British shippers

30

Trauma and the construction of race

and aristocracy, and chiefly Tahitians and Hawaiians. Holt’s memoirs Recollections connects him genealogically to prominent historical figures through the recounting of family stories and events. Holt was also an acknowledged authority on Hawaiian culture. But he found little reflection of it in the discipline of anthropology. Between 1943 and 1946, Holt majored in anthropology at Columbia University, leaving without taking a degree (Ronck 1993). His novel perhaps articulates his reservations about the Boasian anthropology then flourishing in the metropole: the stark and troubling division between subject and object for the “native” anthropologist. Waimea Summer details the semi-autobiographical story of Mark Hull, a hapa haole (half-Hawaiian, half-white) youth, who leaves Honolulu for a summer vacation with his paniolo3 uncle, Fred Andrews, in the ranching town of Waimea on the island of Hawai‘i. Amid the financial and social decline of his once-prominent family, Mark glimpses the cultural practices of his rural relations and begins to understand what it means to be Hawaiian. The resurfacing of older Hawaiian cultural practices produces a narrative structure peppered with recurring instances of traumatic acting-out. Though the central anxiety of the novel is the grave illness of Mark’s young cousin Puna—Fred’s youngest child by his third wife Miriam Lono—the deadly rivalry between the boy’s father and his Uncle Julian takes center stage. This contest over Puna is mirrored in Fred’s hunting expeditions for wild pigs and longhorn cattle. Puna is fatally gored by one of his father’s wild goats while Mark searches out a spiritual cure in Waipi‘o valley. At summer’s end, Mark happens to visit Pu‘u Koholā, the heiau (temple) of Kamehameha I, the first chief to unite the islands under a single ruler. But Mark is troubled by this reminder of his genealogy and its nationalist significance. Because it engages events from contact in 1778 to the passage of the HHCA in 1920, the historical setting of the novel requires attention. Autobiographical, historical, and geographic details place the events of the novel in the late 1920s or early 1930s. In 1933, Holt would have been about 14, Mark’s age in the novel. The slum and “car barn” where Julian rooms in Honolulu date to the early decades of the twentieth century. Ranching practices described in the novel correspond to programs at the Parker Ranch, the real-life model for the fictional Stevenson Ranch.4 The Parker Ranch on the slopes of Mauna Kea is the largest cattle ranch under single ownership in the U.S. and plays a significant role in the passage of the HHCA. These details suggest that the novel is most likely set in the period following the passage of the HHCA. In the post-annexation world of Waimea Summer, U.S. legal constructions of Hawaiian authenticity interfere with more Hawaiian forms of identity. The former, which rely upon pedigree and the date of western contact, conflict with the latter and its valorization of cultural practice and the exercise of sovereignty. Indeed, the blood quantum definition gains ascendancy precisely because of the Calvinist delegitimation of Hawaiian practices and abrogation of native sovereignty. The law defines Hawaiian authenticity in relation to moments of violence—that of western contact and contemporary “legal genocide”—moments which haunt and trouble the protagonist’s search for his identity. The novel asks,

Trauma and the construction of race

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“Might the insidious reminders of ‘inevitable extinction’ elicit trauma? Might trauma be produced discursively via the performative language of the law?”

Reclaiming a violent past: contact and the “ethnographic uncanny” In reconnecting with his Hawaiian relatives, Mark Hull finds a silence-filled and fragmented past, one whose illegibility is deeply troubling. At the dawn of the Hawaiian Renaissance, Holt noted the important relation of Hawaiians to island history: “People of the Hawaiian community are the only ones . . . who bear the burden of our local history that goes deep into time. We are shackled to the historic accretion of distant events that still affect the character of island life” (1974: 17).5 The loss and pain central to this history is made even more problematic by what Holt saw then as a loss of cultural identity: “So much that came down to us was garbled or deliberately distorted. It was difficult to separate truth from untruth . . . let alone know anything at all of the Hawaiian past” (7). The population collapse caused by foreign diseases played an important role in this cultural decline. Just prior to Cook’s arrival in 1778 Hawaiians numbered at the very least between 800,000 and 1 million. By the 1890s they had dwindled to 40,000 (Stannard 1989: 52). Cook’s men were the biological hosts to tuberculosis, influenza, syphilis, gonorrhea, and other diseases. The ships’ departure from England came at a time when three out of four deaths were caused by typhus, typhoid fever, measles, smallpox, bronchitis, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and convulsions, and when smallpox and tuberculosis morbidity were at their peak. William Anderson, the ship’s translator, and Charles Clerke, commander of the Discovery, both died of tuberculosis on this voyage (70, 99–100). Sexuality, reproduction, and disease were also central to the violence of contact. Cook was already aware when he anchored off Kaua‘i in 1778 of the potential for spreading syphilis among the native population. When he left Tahiti for his “discovery” of Hawai‘i, more than half his crew was so enfeebled by venereal disease that there were barely enough men to do ship’s duty. Knowing what he did of Polynesian sexual practices, Cook could have well predicted the devastating consequences of these diseases. At Kaua‘i, he indicates the precautions he took, but expresses resignation about what “will always be the case” between men and women: As there were some venereal complaints on board both the Ships, in order to prevent its being communicated to these people, I gave orders that no Women, on any account whatever were to be admitted on board the Ships, I also forbid all manner of connection with them, and ordered that none who had the venereal upon them should go out of the ships . . . It is no more than what I did when I first visited the Friendly Islands [Tonga] yet I afterwards found it did not succeed . . . [T]he opportunities and inducements to an intercourse between the sex, are there too many to be guarded against. (1967: 265–66)

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In his memoirs Holt notes the relation between population decline and the silence-fi lled past: “So very little survives from ancient times, or even 19th century Hawai‘i. As the population decreased dramatically, the old culture disappeared rapidly, and so did its physical manifestations” (1974: 365). The loss of lands, the closing of Hawaiian language schools, and the banning of the language from public schools in 1896 also played a part in producing the “psychic pain,” “[d]isillusionment,” and “rank disinterest” Holt witnessed during the first half of the twentieth century (8). Beyond these losses, early ethnographic accounts of Hawaiians bear a psychological legacy for Holt: “Always, here in the land of our ancestors, we are psychologically captive to the spirit of the past. The harsh legacy of early observers, who endlessly shouted the myth of superiority of their beliefs over those of Hawaiians, we must constantly live down. You cannot tell a people, whose very souls you have ensnared, that everything about their traditional way of life was bad, without breaking their spirit” (17; my italics). For Holt, then, being Hawaiian in the twentieth century means learning about a past that simultaneously binds one to it even as it threatens to destroy one’s pride in being Hawaiian. Contemporary Hawaiians of the late twentieth century are “less the victims of their heritage” than he and his generation were; they “will be less hampered, less bound to the fragmented, but imposingly powerful, image of the past” (20). The history of contact functions doubly, as marking a moment of authenticity (the date 1778) characterized by violence and physical decline as well as a moment of national plenitude, the ascendancy of Kamehameha I. Both of these moments ground the legal definition of Hawaiian while setting into motion a series of problematic identifications. For this moment and its rediscovery are mediated through the self-othering lens of the ethnographic gaze, the primitivizing maneuvers of the uncanny and its key aesthetic, the gothic. The gothic comments upon how this native nationalist search for the past occurs within (and in spite of) an ongoing colonial occupation. The “uncanny” resurfacing of the past characteristic of the gothic can be viewed from the Hawaiian perspective through the concept of “pō.” The term “pō” is of deep spiritual and genealogical significance, referring to the origin of all things which is associated with darkness (the origin of all life) and the dimly known homeland (Hawaiki) (Dudley 1990: 12). For Mark, Hawaiian spiritual practices, and the beginnings of the nation in the figure of Kamehameha I—who is also Hull’s and Holt’s ancestor—have been cast into darkness, made dimly known, through EuroAmerican historical accounts and “civilizing” Protestant missions. Conversely, the revival of Hawaiian culture—and the call for sovereignty—also emerges out of pō. But the search for pō is mediated by historical and ethnographic record. That elusive moment prior to western contact—what Greg Dening calls the “ethnographic present”—is a moment of violent inscription: Historically—that part of the past which is knowable because of historical records—there is no “ethnographic present” of traditional societies which is

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not post-intrusion . . . The historical reality of traditional societies is locked together for the rest of time with the historical reality of the intruders who saw them, changed them, destroyed them. There is no history beyond the frontier, free of the contact that makes it. (1980: 42) The reclamation of a “pre-contact” past is always already, therefore, “inauthentic,” fragmented, multiply voiced, and infused by contact. In his search for pō, Mark places his relatives under an ethnographic lens, replicating the othering perspective of contact narrative. After several days at his Uncle Fred’s home in Waimea, Mark confides the predicament of being a part-Hawaiian: “Many strange things did go on in Hawaiian families where the mixture of blood and heritage divided one in two, causing people—much to their own distress—to combine both defiance and acceptance of the old beliefs. This certainly seemed true of Fred after only a few days of observing him in the context of his indigenous habitat” (21; my italics). Mark’s objectifying and detached tone hides his fear of Hawaiian spirituality, claiming these practices as knowledge: “‘I came up here for the first time today. It’s quite interesting’” (33). His false objective tone conceals an uneasiness that is, in some sense, similar to the way a scientizing ethnography attempts to explain “primitive” healing methods which threaten the rational tenets of western science. But Mark’s Calvinist beliefs also attempt to contain Hawaiian practices as primitive superstition. His anxiety about the practice of ho‘omana,6 the praying to death of an individual, troubles his return to pō (120, 131). Both western rationality and Calvinist repression produce the primitivization of pō—as well as its uncanny resurfacing. Freud grounds the two repressive causes for the uncanny in the repression of infantile complexes (such as the castration complex) and western rationality’s repression of primitive beliefs (1955b: 249). Death figures prominently in the latter precisely because science and biology have not been able to explain whether death is inevitable or avoidable. The fear of death links us to the primitive past since, despite our western education, “we” all “think as savages do on this topic”: the primitive fear of the dead is “still strong within us,” “ready to come to the surface on any provocation” (242). This type of uncanny, then, is not the result of repression per se but a product of “civilization,” the surmounting of animistic beliefs: We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed that these possibilities [e.g., omnipotence of thoughts, wish fulfi llment, return of the dead, secret powers, etc.] were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens . . . which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny. (247–48)

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The uncanny in Holt’s novel arises out of the particular history of Calvinist missions, their suppression of Hawaiian practices during the nineteenth century within a “civilizing” project. Their uncanny re-emergence in the everyday life of Mark Hull is signaled by the gothic. Throughout his essay, Freud distinguishes between “real life” and fiction, privileging real events over those which can be manufactured in fiction: “in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life” (1955b: 249). Traumatic realism attempts to undo the west’s construction of reality by juxtaposing—on the same plane—a rationalist notion of “the real” with the illegitimate quotidian, the everyday of what has been deemed “primitive.” Though close to the uncanny, it reveals as a site of epistemological violence the boundary between the rational and “western,” on the one hand, and the would-be “primitive” and animistic, on the other. It thereby challenges the reader to remake his/her sense of reality. This is its radical potential. As Freud acknowledges, the uncanny occurs “when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced” (244). What happens, then, to the uncanny in the colonial context, specifically in a character who must confront “primitive” beliefs that have not been “surmounted” but are rather barely buried at all, almost co-existing side-by-side with “rational” notions of reality? The series of increasingly more severe panic responses that structure Holt’s novel are triggered by resurfacings of the “primitive” past. Each event revolves around the uncanny subject of death, the fear of death by ho‘omana, or the fear of the illegibility of signs surrounding death: Mark’s vomiting following the killing of a goat; his attack response after hearing Julian’s ku-wo wail; his attack response after a dream; his retching following the slaughter of a bull; and his final panic and flight response at Pu‘u Koholā Heiau (historic site of Keōua’s death). In each example, Mark responds with varying degrees of sweating, shaking, vomiting, and loss of bodily control. The term “partial trauma” describes Mark’s early panic responses. Partial trauma is formed by a group of provoking causes which exercise a traumatic effect by summation. They are “part components of a single story of suffering” (Krystal 1978). The final event at Pu‘u Koholā Heiau, then, is the activating event which produces trauma per se, while the partial traumas achieve their significance as such only in retrospect. But as this list of partial traumas reveals, Mark’s responses take on a physicality that goes beyond the uncanny. More than any other condition, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) demonstrates the interdependence of the psychological and physiological (van der Kolk 1987: xi). While mainstream psychiatry has failed to look closely at the social conditions of illness, trauma demands that we view human beings as biologically, socially, and psychologically constituted (xii). One of the key characteristics of traumatized persons is a hyperreactive, hyperaroused autonomic nervous system which causes them to respond even to minor stimuli with an intensity appropriate only to emergency situations (van der Kolk and Greenberg 1987: 66). In the first example of trauma, Joe Kalama and Julian Lono slaughter a nanny-

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goat: “Together they skinned the animal with a dexterity that flabbergasted my city eyes. I watched the performance in a state combining fascination and nausea: liliha as the Hawaiians say” (15). The cultural distance between the observer Mark and his relatives is important in this scene. For Julian sees Mark as a “creature of the city, a foreigner to these hard, exotic, far-flung rituals, and therefore to be pitied” (15). Again, Mark’s ethnographic voice overlays Julian’s perspective, in effect ethnologizing Julian as an exotic primitive engaging in “far flung rituals.” But Mark’s ethnographic objectivity is disrupted by his bodily response— flight and uncontrollable retching: “Joe’s manners irked me even more than my stomach, which quivered threateningly. In extreme embarrassment I ran from the bloody scene and vomited” (15–16). Mark cannot maintain his objectivity because of what he perceives to be the “pagan” nature of their actions, revealed in his Puritanical interpretation of the event: “I could hear the peals of laughter sent up around and above the half-skinned carcass of the slaughtered goat like pagan cries at a sacrifice. The air stank of warm blood and excreta” (16). He calls his relatives a “dirty bunch of kuaaina kanakas,” but his words are “lost under the swirls of laughter” (16). The term “kuaaina kanakas” (“rural or rustic Hawaiians”) suggests they are primitive, not civilized, from the city, like himself. Indeed, Mark’s response to the event evokes not a summer vacation with relatives, but rather a captivity narrative’s desire for escape: the writing of a letter to his father requesting “a return first class ticket be sent [him] immediately” (16). Later, when Fred’s jealousy toward Julian forces the latter to leave Waimea, Mark awakens in the night to hear the “wailing, lamenting ku-wo tones of the kanikau” (27).7 Interpreting Julian’s chant to be a “death wail,” Mark responds physically: “My body froze, my skin tingled as goose bumps formed all over . . . I shut the door. I paced the room, holding my hands over my ears . . . I let my hands fall, clenched them, and struck my thighs” (27). When Julian enters, Mark rushes to the door, attempts to strike him, and sobs uncontrollably. The cause of his fear? The Calvinist missionary view that Hawaiians are primitive: “Each room in the house, each item passed before my eyes, until they settled on Kroa, the Ape Boy and the stares of the stuffed monkeys. I fell to the floor and settled on my knees. ‘Oh God in Heaven,’ I prayed in the merest whisper, ‘If ever I have had cause to doubt your great goodness, your great love . . .’” (27). The image of Kroa which evokes Mark’s desperate prayer is a lithograph of a “hairy little creature” shown sitting on the lap of a “noted” scientist (8). Kroa himself was brought back in the 1890s by Fred’s father as a “souvenir from Paris” (8). His framed image is exhibited along with a glass-enclosed display of pet spider monkeys, birds, and other animals preserved by taxidermy. Mark notes, “Not even the cautious efforts of expert taxidermy, at a time when this skill must have reached its apex, had removed the morose expressions on the monkey’s faces which leered out from the confines of glass in absolute contempt of humans, one and all!” (9–10). Like the contemptuous monkeys, Kroa condescends to the pretensions of the Victorian parlor. Mark wonders how long “this macabre decoration had looked down upon the breakfasts of [his] Waimea relatives” (8). But what is the relation between Kroa and Mark’s turn to prayer? Mark’s

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interpretation of Julian’s prayer as a death wail is denied by Julian himself who claims to be protecting Puna from evil spirits (28). For Mark, however, these practices (for good or evil purposes) conflict with his missionary heritage. Likewise, Kroa and the monkeys remind Mark of a now-racialized and primitivized Hawaiian past that resurfaces in spite of their attempt to deny its existence through Christian living and “civilized” EuroAmerican culture. While psychology would view these two events as examples of acting-out, from a more Hawaiian perspective Puna’s illness and Mark’s physical responses might be interpreted differently. Puna’s illness is caused by “hukihuki,” a situation in which “opposing individuals or groups tug [huki], pull and pressure to gain emotional ascendancy over another individual or group” (Pukui et al. 1983: 88). While adults can often escape hukihuki, children almost always internalize the conflict, become sick, or even die (89). While the concept of hukihuki is common to many cultures, there are certain traditionally Hawaiian situations in which it tends to arise: in the practices of hānai (informal adoption of a firstborn by grandparents or other relatives) and luhi (fostering on a non-permanent basis). The conflict between Fred and Julian over Puna stems from a conflict between traditional and western sexual and familial practices. Julian tries to resolve the problem of hukihuki by surrendering Puna to Fred, as Pukui et al. advise, but Fred is unable to care for the child adequately (hence, his fatal goring by one of Fred’s own goats). Similarly, Mark’s physical response to Julian’s prayer, the coldness and goose bumps, is called “ōkakala,” a type of skin sign (‘ili ‘ōuli). ‘Ili ‘ōuli are “disturbed skin sensations” which indicate omens or supernatural signs. “Ōkakala”—which can encompass a tingling, prickling, numbing, chilling or “creepy-crawly” sensation—foretells a misfortune or signifies a supernatural presence (Pukui et al. 1983: 92). Regardless of how one is meant to interpret ‘ili ‘ōuli, the sign remains unintelligible to Mark who responds hysterically, attempting to block out Julian’s chant and the portents themselves with Christian prayer. Mark’s beating of himself and Julian, then, are traumatic reactions not so much to the resurfacing of older practices (hukihuki) or epistemologies (‘ili ‘ōuli), but to the cultural violence which delegitimated and suppressed these practices. Mark’s beating re-enacts missionary attempts to obliterate spiritual manifestations on the surface of the body. While the date of western contact sets in motion a self-othering ethnographic gaze, it also establishes a notion of Hawaiian premised upon the authenticity of pre-contact culture. Mark’s dream of being a midshipman with Cook revisits the “ethnographic present,” the traumatic moment of western contact: I came face to face with young Kamehameha who was studying one of the ship’s cannon. He made a lunge for my throat. I awoke and saw a mask hovering over me. I yelled. Then the apparition began to laugh. I threw off my covers and leaped for Georgie’s face. He ran back to his room through the hallway. I followed, pounding him on the back. He did not stop laughing. Then abruptly he began to cry, “Nough! Nough! I call my seestahs if you no stop!” (47–48)

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Particularly notable in this scene is the connection between contact and violence. Even more curious is that a 14-year-old boy would dream of events such as these which mirror actual journal accounts by Cook’s men. Whence do these images arise? From the unconscious, a Freudian reading would answer. But do they arise from the repressed reading of actual accounts, or are they uncanny resurfacings of a contact event? Three key events of Mark’s dream—Kamehameha’s interest in the ship’s cannon, his attack on Mark, and Mark’s beating of Georgie—correspond to at least three recorded events of Cook’s second landing at Kealakekua in February 1779. After several months of partaking of Hawaiian generosity, Cook, having exhausted his welcome, departed Kealakekua. However, in a fierce storm, the Resolution sprung its main mast, forcing a return to Kealakekua Bay for repairs. In the first of these historical corollaries, Kamehameha’s interest in iron daggers (pāhoa) corresponds to his (dream) interest in the ship’s cannon. On February 10, 1779, before the ships drop anchor, Kamehameha boards Clerke’s Discovery with his aikāne companion (in simplified terms, a male lover). He trades a feather cloak for nine daggers, a crucial detail. David Samwell provides an othering perspective on the future founder of the Hawaiian nation: Kameha-meha a chief of great consequence and a Relation of Kariopoo [Kalani‘ōpu‘u], but of a clownish and blackguard appearance, came on board of us in the afternoon dressed in an elegant feathered Cloak, which he brought to sell but would part with it for nothing but iron Daggers, which they have of late preferred to Tois and everything else; and all the large Hogs they bring us now they want Daggers for and tell us that they must be made as long [as] their arms, and the armourers are employed in making them instead of small adzes. Kameha-meha got nine of them for his Cloak. He with many of his attendants took up his quarters on board the ship for the Night: among them is a Young Man of whom he seems very fond, which does not in the least surprize us as we have had opportunities before of being acquainted with a detestable part of his Character which he is not in the least anxious to conceal. (1967: 1190)8 This scene reveals Samwell’s ambivalent attitude toward Kamehameha, his interest in the west but also his radical difference, his “clownish and blackguard appearance” and same-sex desire. Kamehameha’s interest in western war technology proved crucial to his rise to power. Not only did his use of the cannon secure his first victory on the island of Maui, his knowledge of muskets—provided him by Isaac Davis and John Young, two men who arrived in 1790—was also key. The second dream element, Kamehameha’s attempt to strangle Mark, a midshipman, corresponds to the actual beating of a master and midshipman by an ali‘i the day before Cook’s fatal encounter. In attempting to hold a canoe ransom for a man who stole items off the ship, the master Edgar and the midshipman

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Vancouver were beaten by a chief named Palea (Beaglehole 1974: 665; Gilbert 1982: 104). While examples abound of Cook’s punishment of islanders for thievery, this is one of the rare occasions, if not the first in Hawai‘i, where an ali‘i punishes a seaman for stealing his property! Cook himself seems to have lost control in this episode, becoming “the victim of a wild-goose chase” (Beaglehole 1974: 665). Further, the British become figures of mockery: There was a mob close about, and other bodies gathering as the dark came on; at first when the marine made as if to present his piece, the mob would fall back; then they began to laugh. Where now was the respect, where now were the prostrations before Lono, the murmurs of awe? (665; my italics) The third dream event, Mark’s stabbing motions upon waking, corresponds to Cook’s death. The events of the fatal day, February 14, 1779, also center on thievery, this time the Discovery’s cutter. Cook attempts to ransom Kalani‘ōpu‘u for the stolen boat. However, events do not go as planned. Attempting to maintain order, Cook fires at two Hawaiians, killing one. As he signals to the seamen to fire and yells a retreat, hysteria ensues. He is clubbed from behind and stabbed in the neck or shoulder by a Hawaiian bearing an iron dagger (672).9 As with the events of the previous day, Cook’s death is precipitated by Hawaiians turning against Cook’s economy of criminality and punishment; ironically, the pāhoa is the means. Mark’s dream is a traumatic reenactment of ethnographic history, a kind of “ethnographic trauma,” precisely because the events of the dream, which have historical equivalents described in journal accounts,10 elicit Mark’s physical response. This involuntary response on Mark’s part physically recapitulates the chief’s stabbing of Cook. The dream and its traumatic acting out display a stark shift in perspective. During the dream, Mark sees himself as an aspiring British officer. After Kamehameha’s attempt to strangle him, Mark awakens and reverses identification, becoming the Hawaiian chief who stabs Cook. The dream and acting-out reveal multiple and conflicting identifications. In each of the three dream events and their historical correlatives, the earlier hospitality toward the British has been replaced by a distrust and disrespect for Cook and his men. These scenes evoke the tension of contact in which the incommensurability of worlds becomes clear. Mark’s dream, then, presents the central problematic of understanding his Hawaiian past. Turning to the earliest historical accounts of his culture means seeing himself through the lens of British explorers and seamen—in effect, experiencing himself as both ethnographic object and subject—and addressing the reality of violence that contact produced—being both subject and object of violence, both “perpetrator” and “victim.” Further, because he is descended from both EuroAmericans and Hawaiians, contact takes place internally. This is why he identifies as both British midshipman and ali‘i. After the dream, Mark again desires to “escape” from Waimea; he feels foreign to the more traditionally Hawaiian world of Julian and

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Joe; their world, what Mark imagines to be connected to pre-contact Hawai‘i, is closed to him, sealed behind “the vaultlike silence Hawaiians practice to perfection” (48). Most striking about Mark’s dream, however, is that in both his identifications, the British character remains a victim of Hawaiian aggression. The midshipman is abused by Kamehameha; Cook is stabbed by the ali‘i. At this point in the novel, Mark’s fantasies of escape and exclusion reveal his identification of Hawaiian-ness with aggression and savagery against the British. However, the historical events themselves demonstrate not Hawaiian aggression but, rather, Hawaiian appropriation and transformation of western culture, a refusal, in fact, of this division between “civilized” and “savage.” The Hawaiians transform western war technology to their own advantage and turn the economy of criminality and punishment against the British! Violence results because of Eurocentric unwillingness to compromise the purity of the categories subject–object, civilized–savage, victim–perpetrator. When exactly was the purity that marks 1778 as a distinguishing moment? The date 1778, which marks the historical basis for legal definitions of Hawaiian, is a moment of mutually exclusive, conflicting identifications. Hawaiian chief and British explorer appear to be irreconcilable positions. The date puts into motion an ethnographic self-othering of Hawaiian practices and epistemologies, a perspective which misrepresents native agency. As we shall see, the uncanny resurfacing of Hawaiian practices also stirs up the history of nineteenth-century resistance to Calvinist prohibitions.

The shape of history: masking and adultery. Gothic novel or traumatic realism? On first examination, Waimea Summer, with its haunted house, violent jealous husband, mysterious dead wife, and declining family fortunes, reads like a gothic novel.11 The novel even opens with the dread and foreboding associated with the gothic: At four in the morning . . . I awoke and was gripped by a sense of doom and apprehension, even before I could shake off the lingering remnants of sleep. All the things I’d heard said about Waimea being a place ridden with ghosts and black magic seemed now to be true . . . [T]his morning, in my darkened room, a chilling sense of portent and unseen things being everywhere had complete hold of me. (1) Mark’s visit is haunted by such moments. And yet, the gothic categorization is insufficient. A gothic reading, while acknowledging the domestic, forestalls the history of nineteenth-century political resistance against missionary dominance: the deeper subtext of Kamehameha III’s (Kauikeaouli) opposition to prohibitions against traditional sexual practices and their relation to genealogy and land.

40 Trauma and the construction of race In an early “gothic moment” in the novel, Mark innocently asks Julian how long he has lived in Fred’s household. Julian replies, “‘Ovah five yeah. After my seestah Miriam marry you uncle’” (11). Mark senses immediately a “chill” and “threatening gloom” set into the house, “wafted in on the vibrations of Julian’s words” (11). Offering no explanation, Mark escapes the confines of the house. But what is the source of this gloom? Julian’s intimation suggests that his relationship with his married sister continued even after her marriage to Fred. Fred’s jealousy over Miriam’s love for her brother, then, takes on a different meaning, as does Puna’s physical resemblance to Miriam and Julian (46, 148). Likewise, Julian’s later comment contains a deeper and more literal meaning, “‘Puna like my own kid. Since he was baby, he aloha me. Keia keiki kapu [This child is sacred.]’” (18; my italics). The term “kapu” strongly suggests Puna is a kapu moe child, one in front of whom commoners were required on pain of death to prostrate themselves. Such children were the result of pi‘o union between brother and sister. Nī‘aupi‘o or pi‘o were sacred unions between brother and sister ali‘i (chiefs).12 The children of such unions were sacred, the “closest link of man to the gods,” because mana (spiritual or divine power) was concentrated in them (Holt 1993: 281; Pukui and Elbert 1986: 94). Holt points out that such children were not allowed to roam freely, were kept pure, traveled only at night, and were rarely seen: “By not moving about too much, the risk of contamination was reduced or eliminated. The pi‘o chiefs travelled about mostly at night when they would not be seen. The mana of these sacred people radiated in all directions and could be dangerous . . . At the approach of these sacred humans, the populace lay face down immediately to avoid seeing them (the kapu moe, or prostration taboo)” (1993: 281). According to Kame‘eleihiwa, nī‘aupi‘o matings are one of the three principles of Wākea which structure Hawaiian belief systems; chiefly incest is one means of perpetuating mana. Out of the union of Wākea, the sky father, and his sister Papa, the earth mother, comes their daughter, Ho‘ohōkūkalani; from the secret and incestuous mating of father and daughter come the two elder siblings of the Hawaiian people: kalo (the taro plant) and ali‘i nui (or high chiefs).13 The three lessons of Wākea involve 1) Mālama ‘āina which places maka‘āinana (commoners), the ali‘i (chiefs), and the cultivation of kalo in intimate relation; 2) ‘Aikapu (the eating taboo) which separates the sacred (male) element from the dangerous (female) element; and 3) Nī‘aupi‘o which perpetuates mana through chiefly incest (1992: 25). The story of Papa and Wākea suggests two forms of pi‘o: brother–sister matings and father–daughter matings (40). Uncle–niece or aunt–nephew (ho‘i) matings were also possible particularly because in Hawaiian any member of one’s parents’ generation was given the name of makuakāne (father) or makuahine (mother). The term for child, “keiki,” includes nephews, nieces, hānai (adopted), as well as daughters and sons (41). The practice of incest is proof of divinity as its practice by lesser chiefs and commoners was considered a direct challenge to chiefly authority (40). But prohibitions against incest and adultery are key markers of western “civilization.” Pre-contact Hawaiian practices of multiple matings and the absence

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of marriage in the western sense upset the legitimacy and legality of a single set of known parents valued by western cultures. Likewise, chiefly incest upsets the incest taboo, one of the western marks of human-ness, according to social anthropology. Claude Lévi-Strauss in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) represents the incest prohibition as a “scandal” within the age-old nature/ culture question because this taboo is both supposedly universal (“natural”) and a prohibition—and therefore, “cultural”: “the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, and indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized the contradictory attributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of all social rules, which possesses at the same time a universal character” (quoted in Derrida 1989: 963). Pi‘o calls attention to the inaccuracy of Lévi-Strauss’s claim that the incest prohibition is universal and natural. Pi‘o is not a prohibition at all but a means to perpetuating mana and the cosmogonic principles of Wākea. Its practice threatens Eurocentric conceptions of kinship relations. Further, while the incest prohibition might blur the distinction between nature and culture, pi‘o invalidates the universality and naturalness of the prohibition even as it shows cultural values to be relative; what is prohibited in one culture is cultivated in others. These social anthropological perceptions of culture are blinded by their own cultural biases. Such Eurocentric standards for human-ness create notions of Hawaiian social practices which are primitivizing and de-humanizing; they imply that Hawaiians are degenerate, not possessing “culture,” and therefore not human. And, as we have seen, this primitivization is central to the uncanny, the gothic itself relying upon “civilized” prohibition of incest and adultery. What, then, is the significance of Julian and Miriam’s relationship? Since Julian and Miriam are the only survivors of the Lono family of Waipi‘o who died in the influenza epidemic of 1920, the child Puna is highly significant (46). Words and names have peculiar power for Hawaiians as names reveal the character or destiny of a person or thing (Charlot 1983: 41–2). The family name “Lono” indicates chiefly lineage, the most celebrated being Lonoikamakahiki, who by virtue of his name was considered kinolau (a material representation) of the god Lono (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 30). Chiefs named after the gods were also associated with their characteristics. A person worshiped the god (akua) associated with his profession because the akua could “prosper any man in his calling” (Beckwith 1940: 81). The worship of Lonoikamakahiki was revived in contemporary times in the 1980s on the island of Kaho‘olawe. In order to revive the land after decades of U.S. military bombing, Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele describes the rituals and chants addressed to Lono that bring rain and re-vegetation (1995).14 “Lono” also evokes Cook’s “deification” and the anthropological and historical debates about Cook’s death. Refuting the claims of Sahlins and Beaglehole, Gananath Obeyesekere argues that Cook was not deified as the akua Lono but rather was given the chiefly name to commemorate the season of his arrival (1992: 96). Herb Kawainui Kāne argues that “Orono,” the words heralding Cook while at Kealakekua Bay, could be interpreted as “ho‘olono” (“Listen! Harken!”), a phrase that alerted commoners to prostrate themselves at the approach of a

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high-ranking chief (Borofsky 1997: 266). The name Lono, regardless, signals how the understanding of pre-contact practices and meanings is the site of interpretive contention. The various associations of the name Lono suggest Julian’s chiefly status as well as his connection to the god Lono, considered the patron of the arts celebrating human sexuality and fertility. The Makahiki season celebrates Lono by cultivating mana through pleasure. A person could capture the fertility of the god by mating with a high-born chief or chiefess. But if he were skilled in sports, or gifted in hula and chant, he might gain an introduction at court and perhaps become an aikāne, a male lover of a male ali‘i nui. The aikāne could, after a time, be taken as the lover of a high chiefess as well and thereby cultivate mana through this alliance (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 47). In Waimea Summer Julian is associated with sexual pleasure. At the July Fourth dance, he boldly attempts to seduce Fred’s future wife, Lepeka: “As he passed, he flashed a gorgeous look at Lepeka: bold, quick, rich in charm, and of clear intent” (93). Later, when Julian dances with her, Mark notices the ancient Hawaiian sense of pleasure associated with the sexual playfulness of le‘ale‘a: “Julian and Lepeka were in a close embrace, their cheeks touching, their movements serene. A pagan air, lingering on from earlier days, seemed to surround us. We had stepped out of time, were really phantoms skittering perilously close to the outer edges of reality in our play” (95). Joe’s report of Julian’s dance partners that evening implies his pursuit of pleasure: “He dance wit two, tree wahines. Den he fine Mele Ignacio an’ he dance wit her till da en’. She one pupule wahine15 use to go wit Julian befoah.” “The one he . . .?” I stopped. “No, dat one live Waipio. Mele Ignacio ees one real goodtimer from Kona.” (101) Their conversation suggests Julian’s reputation as one who has had many lovers. The woman’s name, “Mele,” means a song or chant, to sing or chant, or simply, “merry” (Pukui and Elbert, 1986: 98), thus referring to the artistic and celebratory aspects of Lono. Positioning Julian as an ali‘i who is a kinolau of the god, the name Lono also links him to two Hawaiian practices, chiefly incest (pi‘o) and the practice of multiple matings. The latter practice was common among both ali‘i and maka‘āinana because in traditional times there was no marriage ceremony beyond the first mating of a high female ali‘i nui. Hawaiian mating relations were characterized by “moe aku, moe mai,” sleeping here and there (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 160). The practice of multiple matings, which characterizes Julian’s sexual practices, is viewed in western terms as adultery. This perhaps is Fred’s greatest fear, that his 5-year-old son Puna was fathered not by Fred himself but by his brother-inlaw. From Julian’s and Miriam’s perspective, pi‘o perpetuates mana in the child Puna and also perpetuates their all-but-defunct family line. In addition, from

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the Hawaiian perspective, Puna’s multiple paternal possibilities are entirely acceptable, even preferable. In traditional mating practice, po‘olua, literally “two heads,” allows the child of a high-born woman to claim descent and mana from three sources, that of his/her mother and both fathers (43). However, from Fred’s western point of view, the possibility of multiple parentage delegitimates both his marriage to Miriam and his son, and further questions his own masculine role as husband and father. Fred also denies the validity of hānai in refusing to allow Julian (whom Puna obviously loves) to become Puna’s adopted father. In punalua, which means “two springs,” two lovers who share a single mate (e.g., two men and one woman, or two women and one man) put jealousy aside and agree to share; “envy between lovers was considered very bad form and subject to derision” (43). Punalua children could be adopted (hānai) by one of the parents. Linking Julian to the god Lono through naming and sexual practice—all beneath the veneer of the gothic—functions as a resistant postcolonial strategy as well as an example of the Hawaiian aesthetic of kaona. This resistant aesthetic, termed “masking”, counters a narrative seeking to present the colonized as a uniform, “surveyable surface.” Instead, masking offers only “surfaces pitted or mined with uncertainty, depth and shallows whose contours vary depending on the ‘familiarity’ of the observer” (Lloyd 1993: 99). Through its ambiguous resistance and assimilation, such strategies refuse appropriation into the totalizing history of both empire and anti-colonial nationalism. Though masking critiques postcolonial nationalism, it is also useful for examining resistance to colonial power seeking to subsume the “unruly” native body within the teleology of imperial history. Reading this pitted and mined surface of masking involves reading with “a side-glancing historical eye” similar to distinguishing the many layers of meaning in Hawaiian oral tradition: kaona. Kaona refers to the multiple layers of hidden meanings and references to persons, places, things, and events in songs or chants (Pukui and Elbert 1986: 130; Charlot 1983). But the west’s prohibition of adultery and incest—upon which rests the gothic uncanny—masks the politicized significance of Hawaiian practices. The practices of po‘olua and pi‘o connect Julian to an important figure of Hawaiian resistance and sovereignty, Kauikeaouli, the third Mō‘ī (king) of Hawai‘i. Their stories resemble one another’s in at least three ways: their pursuit of the path of Lono through pleasure; their fathering a pi‘o child; and their association with dispossession. Julian’s historical resemblance to Kamehameha III suggests that the gothic elements actually mask another aesthetic altogether, that of traumatic realism and its deployment of history. In traumatic realism the delegitimation of native culture continues to resurface obliquely because the inscription of power is ongoing, extending into the present in an uninterrupted manner. Kaona in this context, then, is inflected with this history of anti-colonial struggle. Kauikeaouli, Lono, and pleasure In 1833, a century prior to the setting of Holt’s novel, Kauikeaouli claimed the office of king, becoming Kamehameha III. By then, Hawaiian sexual practices

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had become deeply politicized by the prohibitions of missionaries and the conversion of prominent chiefs, including his adopted mother and advisor, Ka‘ahumanu. Throughout his reign, Calvinists such as Hiram Bingham continued to restrict Hawaiian cultural practices, including games and hula. Upon Ka‘ahumanu’s death, the king named as his new advisor Kaomi, a half-Tahitian who had cured him through a miraculous art of healing (Kamakau 1992: 334–35). But Kaomi, to the Calvinists’ horror, was also the king’s aikāne. The king and his new advisor immediately revived forbidden cultural practices: ‘awa drinking,16 hula, gambling, lovemaking, and other pleasures (le‘ale‘a). He rescinded laws requiring church attendance and taught people how to brew okolehao (ti root liquor) to prevent their becoming indebted to foreigners for access to alcohol. In 1833 he proclaimed his sovereignty and attempted to subvert the Calvinist stronghold: “I shall rule with justice over all the land, make and promulgate laws: neither the chiefs nor the foreigners have any voice in making laws for this country. I alone am the one” (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 157–9). Later, when the Calvinists and their followers refused the king’s plans for land redistribution, they targeted Kaomi, accusing him of corrupting the king. The missionaries were horrified by Kaomi because although many male ali‘i were “bisexual,” the aikāne was motivated by desire, not concern for genealogy or offspring (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 160–1).17 Bingham, discussing multiple unions, aikāne, and pi‘o as heathen practices, dismisses Kaomi’s death: “Kaomi fell into neglect, and ere long, faded away and died, none seeming materially to feel his loss, or to envy the fleeting honors and pleasures of such an infidel despiser of revealed religion” (1847: 21, 455). Fred’s attitudes reflect this missionary view of Hawaiian sexuality. He sniffs out Julian’s “sexual deviance” in the figure of the māhū.18 He says to Mark: “‘And another thing I can’t for the life of me tolerate are these Goddamned mahus . . . fall in love with their own sex! . . . I’ve long suspected that son-of-a-bitch [Julian] who recently left this house. That’s why I told you to leave him alone!’ He leaned forward in the rocking chair, leering. ‘That’s why I didn’t like the idea of him being in your room!’” (68). Regardless of whether or not Julian is “māhū,” as Fred fears, Julian’s pursuit of sexual pleasure evokes the prohibited practices of le‘ale‘a and aikāne. Pi‘o practices Included within these prohibited practices was the pi‘o union. After the death of Kaomi in 1833, Kauikeaouli began to live openly with his only sister, Princess Nāhi‘ena‘ena. They had maintained a secret affair for the previous five or six years. To appease the Calvinists, she belatedly married Leleiōhoku who became punalua to the Mō‘ī. Kauikeaouli’s hope for a nī‘aupi‘o heir19 ended when Nāhi‘ena‘ena’s infant son died after birth in 1836, followed later that year by Nāhi‘ena‘ena herself. His hopes for a return to the old ways died with them. He took a legal wife.20 The missionary faction gained full control of the government while Kauikeaouli converted outwardly to Christianity. These events paved the way for the disastrous Māhele of 1848.

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The Calvinist denunciation of Nāhi‘ena‘ena and her “incestuous” relation with her brother echoes that of Kaomi. Bingham dismisses her death, avoiding mention of the kapu moe heir or the princess’s intimate relation with her brother. He mentions only that her funeral occurred after Kauikeaouli’s marriage to Kalama, even though Nāhi‘ena‘ena died some months earlier: “The marriage of his majesty with his favorite Kalama, was solemnized on the 4th of February, 1837. Soon after this the remains of his sister, with considerable pomp and display, a large military guard being called out to attend, were borne, in procession to the church, where a concourse assembled” (Bingham 1847: 498). The juxtaposition of funeral and wedding suggests Bingham’s denial of the princess’s intimate relation with her brother, in particular that he would not have married Kalama if his sister had been alive. Bingham explains her death as punishment for heathen practices: This beautiful flower, once the pride of the nation . . . having been blighted, through the power of the great enemy, was now cut down, and passed away. During the days of her wasting sickness . . . efforts were made to lead her to repentance; but with what success is not yet fully known. She was induced to confess her sin and folly, and once more, in her distress, to call on the name of the Lord. She left a faint hope that she may be found to have been heard in an accepted time. (498; my italics) Bingham reads her death as a sign of the sinfulness of Hawaiian cultural practices, as an “exhibition of divine truth,” and a warning for those “who had hardened themselves in sin” (499). He delegitimates pi‘o as a “ fashion” which continued “till the revealed will of God was made known to them by our Mission” (20; my italics). But Bingham’s frustration at her lack of repentance signals the resistant nature of her actions. The novel connects Julian to Kauikeaouli through an allusive example of kaona, Julian’s outpouring of grief at Puna’s vigil: “‘Child of my heart’s love! My most precious flower! Fruit of my sister’s womb! . . . Tell me, love’s child, tell me why!’” (187). His reference to Puna as “love’s child” is curious in light of his following accusation that Fred has murdered Puna and in light of his knowledge of Fred and Miriam’s troubled marriage. Julian’s granduncle, sharing his grief, responds: “‘How heavy is the grief of Kauikeaouli,’ . . . using the proverbial expression of the young king’s mourning for his sister, joined to him in the lastknown pio marriage of the mana-rank chiefs” (187). If Julian is Puna’s father, the child’s death suggests the end of the Lono lineage that represents metaphorically the death of Hawaiian generations, as the fertility of the ali‘i was representative of the fertility of the land.21 The connections between Julian and Kauikeaouli abound: his co-habitation with his chiefly sister and her husband, the death of his sister shortly after the birth of her son, the death of that son at a young age, and the absence of an heir of his own blood.

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Dispossession and the Māhele But what did Kauikeaouli’s sexual politics have to do with land and sovereignty? Calvinists offered private ownership of land as a liberal “cure” for the so-called moral degeneracy manifested in Hawaiian traditions. The land division act, the Māhele of 1848, represented this promise of a cure. Instead, it not only dealt the final blow to the principles of Wākea, the sacred relation between the people and the land, but also brought about native dispossession. As a result of the Māhele, Kauikeaouli lost 82 percent of his lands, and the ali‘i lost more than two-thirds of their holdings. By 1848, Kauikeaouli, intending to benefit the Hawaiian people by giving most of his lands to the government for sale, retained as “Crown Lands” only 144 of the 934 parcels he originally claimed. The king’s generosity in relinquishing twice the initial amount of onethird was a sign of aloha for his nation, his wish that this Māhele be a more equitable distribution of land (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 233). However, a mere 29 percent of eligible Hawaiian males received a kuleana land claim. In aggregate, this amounted to less than 1 percent of the total acreage in Hawai‘i. By 1850, a new law allowed foreigners—even those not swearing allegiance to the kingdom of Hawai‘i—to buy and own land, appeasing those who claimed they would not feel secure in Hawai‘i without the right to fee simple ownership of land (295–99). Prominent cabinet ministers and missionaries bought up much of the ali‘i lands at extremely low prices. The Crown Lands, much of it mortgaged or sold, was made inalienable in 1865 though still controlled by a foreign-dominated Board of Commissioners of Crown Lands. By 1894 the Provisional Government headed by Sanford B. Dole (a son of a missionary) had confiscated the Crown Lands. From the time of the Māhele in 1848 to the imprisonment of Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1893, the two major concerns of government were the constant threat of foreign takeover and depopulation by foreign diseases. During this 45-year period, the Hawaiian population dwindled by 50 percent, from 88,000 (approximately one-tenth of the population when Cook arrived) to a mere 40,000. How was such a large-scale theft of lands justified? In 1846 Robert C. Wyllie, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, published a report arguing that commoners were not dying in large numbers due to foreign diseases but due to their “licentious, indolent, improvident and ignorant” character encouraged by their system of land tenure. Hawaiians could be saved from extinction through the liberal cure: “render them industrious, moral and happy” through the private ownership of land. Holding land in fee would motivate “lazy” Hawaiians to become industrious Christians because they would receive the direct benefits of their labor. The population decline would be halted because Hawaiians would relinquish their bad habits, save money, and become wealthy (202).22 This argument becomes the basis for the homesteading argument in the HHCA. Fred’s characterization of Julian as evil, lazy, and degenerate due to his practice of pi‘o, le‘ale‘a, and subsistence reflects this American liberal salvationist view of Hawaiians. Furthermore, Julian’s uncanny resemblance to Kauikeaouli shows how the history of his historical counterpart’s reign more than a century earlier reverberates in the present. While the Māhele contributed to the fall of the monarchy and

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to the old system of land tenure, Holt’s own family experienced similar losses because they lacked adequate funds to pay estate taxes (Holt 1993: 164). Mark Hull notes the irony of his family’s decline. His father works in the land office as a searcher of titles: “‘We are no longer landowners.’ Everyone in the islands knew of the sordid transactions that led to the destruction of the Hull Estate lands” (1976: 118). Julian’s own dispossession and subalternization is completed in the course of the novel, as we see the once chiefly Lono reduced to a landless laborer. Not only does Fred treat Julian as a farmhand, Julian eventually works on a boat that transports cattle to Honolulu. Ironically, the boat’s name is Kamoi, the king, suggesting a radical shift: Kawaihae and Kona, once Kamehameha’s seat of power, have been supplanted by ranching and sugar plantations with Honolulu as the westernized capital to which rural Hawaiians flock and where they struggle against unemployment and poverty. In Honolulu Julian lives near the “car barn,” a section of town that was known to be a slum in the 1920s and 1930s (63).23 Of high lineage but dispossessed of his land, orphaned as a child, and disowned by his in-laws, he is forced to work and live a transient existence between Honolulu and Kawaihae. His decline suggests a radical shift from a system based on genealogy, mana, and communal land tenure to a capitalist one based on labor and the accumulation of property.24 Thus, in the manner of traumatic realism, nineteenth-century resistance—the history of Holt’s “primitive forefathers”—reemerges in the uncanny figure of Julian Lono. This occurs precisely because the inscription of colonial power continues, even thrives, in 1930s Hawai‘i.

Multiple dialectics of race and gender Juxtaposed with Waimea Summer’s tale of political and cultural haunting is the story of Mark’s coming of age, his immersion in Hawaiian culture as well as his sexual initiation. Yet, even here, the novel disturbs generic expectations. Not only do the repeated incidents of traumatic acting-out rupture linear time and narrative development, they render impossible the production of a stable, coherent identity for the protagonist. The Anglo-American Bildungsroman, as Lowe argues, structures relations between citizen and nation, genders public and private spheres, and spacializes race relations, while also determining the shape of narrated history (1996: 98). It charts the development into adulthood of an individual who must reconcile himself with the social order by relinquishing his difference, by assimilating to an idealized national and imperial subjectivity. The formal and stylistic “deviations” of the minority novel—and at the time of the novel’s publication in 1976, one could very well argue that Hawaiians were (and continue to be at this writing) a minority population—reflect the incommensurabilities between official and national history and the historical specificities of minorities. These irregularities interrogate the gap between official and marginalized histories. The HHCA and eugenics discourse re-prioritize and naturalize American white-ness in the post-annexation period, making the production of American masculinity in Holt’s novel the site of contestation. Hapa haole identity becomes

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the site of deferral, splintered by competing forms of white-ness (British and U.S.) and Hawaiian-ness. This multiple dialectics of race and gender mirrors Hawaii’s history of multiple colonialisms. The problem is not one of “either-or” but of “and,” the impossible co-existence of all three categories. The traumatic episodes explored in this section arise out of this conflicted terrain. Part-Hawaiians during the Territorial period were commonly thought of as “degenerates.” Holt recalls an incident at Kamehameha School in which he bit a haole teacher in the stomach because she had beaten him with a blackboard pointer: “Miss H. paced back and forth in the front of the office and raged away at the fact that part-Hawaiians were the worst. They were degenerates by virtue of their mixed blood, a favorite contention of the time, invented in colonial times, no doubt, to keep ambitious mixed bloods in their place” (1993: 169). The discourse of race in the novel centers on a rhetoric of breeding and eugenics in relation to hapa haole men. “Racial degeneration,” a term popularized in the 1890s by the physician and journalist Max Nordau, implies genetic and hereditary decline. Originally defined by French physician Benedict-Augustin Morel as a hereditary and transmissible “morbid variation from an original type,” degeneration caused the individual and his “decadent” posterity to become increasingly less capable of “intellectual and moral progress” as well as reproduction (Soloway 1990: 38). While turn-of-the-century eugenics in the U.S. focused on the large influx of reproductively prolific Eastern and Southern Europeans and the AngloSaxon hysteria about the dark tide of immigration, racial degeneration concerned itself explicitly with miscegenation and “mongrelization.” Two views on miscegenation were common during the first third of the twentieth century: race assimilation (bleaching) and degeneration. Race assimilation argued that interracial marriages would whiten the darker races. Some argued that racial crosses between Europeans and native peoples produced offspring of “complete vigor and fertility” (Castle 1920: 265–66). However, the second, more widely held, view argued that racial mixing would lead to mongrelization. In Being Well-Born, Michael Guyer cautioned against the “great hazard” of mixing “distinctly unrelated races no matter how superior the original strains may be” (Kevles 1985: 75). Charles B. Davenport concluded that while blacks were of an inferior mental capacity to whites, browns or hybrids were “muddled and wuzzle-headed” (Kevles 1985: 75). According to Madison Grant, the “half-breed was every where regarded as a member of the inferior race” (1936: 85). Both perspectives, race assimilation and degeneration, imply extermination. The former, “bleaching,” suggests breeding out racial characteristics by minimizing their circulation. The latter, degeneration, suggests an eventual inability to reproduce. Both are crucial to understanding Mark’s panic responses. In addition to cautioning against miscegenation, American eugenics argued for the weeding out of paupers, syphilitics, epileptics, criminals, degenerates, and all non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Nordic strains. While not directing its discourse toward indigenous peoples, its focus remained circumscribed by the borders of the nation: immigrants, restrictions on marriage, sexual segregation, and sterilization of the insane, the feebleminded, and the criminal. What happens when

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these characteristics are projected onto Hawaiians during the early twentieth century? The extension of an internal domestic issue to the colonies helps to justify U.S. occupation of Hawai‘i in the post-annexation period. Eugenics discourse allows Protestant sugar planters to claim a racial argument to justify their claim to native priority, in effect justifying U.S. manifest destiny to control and annex the islands. In Waimea Summer, Fred’s vilification of Julian stems from a desire to whiten the family. Fred wishes to rid the family of Julian, whom he associates with criminality, promiscuity, and sexual deviance (being māhū) (64). The spectre of pauperism appears in Julian’s dispossession and squalid existence in Honolulu, and in the declining fortunes of the Hull family. In fact, the family’s decline is accompanied by the “darkening” of the children: while Fred’s first wife was a white American woman, Nancy Lansdale, all of his subsequent wives are Hawaiian women of lower status: “commoners—country girls” (46). Physical deficiency can be read into the case of Puna whose health is repeatedly threatened by illness which echoes Kiliwehi and Lemuel Stevenson’s deaths by pneumonia. The Lono family is all but wiped out by a flu epidemic. Puna would appear the most “degenerate” because he may be the nī‘aupi‘o son of two pure-blooded Hawaiians. Puna’s death suggests the kind of curtailed reproduction associated with racial degeneration. It is here that the discursive constructions of race produced by eugenics intersect with legal constructions of “Hawaiian.” These perspectives on Julian and Puna recall how eugenics was used to further dispossess Hawaiians through a logic of racial “extinction” by dilution. Almost a century after the passage of the Māhele, the HHCA established the legal mechanism by which 200,000 acres of Ceded Lands were set aside for the “rehabilitation” of what the law defined as “native Hawaiians,” those persons possessing 50 percent or more blood quantum. Ceded Lands comprise approximately one-third of the land in the State of Hawai‘i. In 1919 Hawaiian leaders John H. Wise, Reverend Akaiko Akana, and Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana‘ole lobbied Congress to allow Hawaiians to access these government trust lands that had been set aside by Kamehameha III to benefit Hawaiian commoners. Hawaiian entitlement to land conflicted with sugar and ranching interests that sought to take advantage of low public land fees and a larger share of the lands by limiting the number of Hawaiians who would be eligible for homesteads. Between 1917 and 1921, 200,000 acres of public land leases were due to expire. (This competition for lands on the part of ranchers continues today. Freddie Rice is a non-Hawaiian rancher from Ka‘u whose family has lived in Hawai‘i for over a hundred years.) Ranching and sugar interests shifted the debate from obligations of trust and entitlement toward those of paternalism and charity. They evoked two race-based stereotypes in order to divide Hawaiians. “Hawaiians” (read “part-Hawaiians”) were Americanized, enterprising, “industrious, prolific, intelligent, and educated,” and therefore entitled to no more than white Americans, while “native Hawaiians” (50 percent or more blood quantum) were by nature of their “race” in danger of extermination and therefore in need of rehabilitation (Kauanui 1999: 129, 132). In fact, Parker Ranch attorney A. G. M. Robertson

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argued that part-Hawaiians were in a different class from “pure bloods,” supporting the notion that Hawaiian-ness rested upon the characteristic of reproductive and social incompetence (133–35). “Full-blooded” Hawaiians, they argued, were rapidly declining, from 142,650 in 1826 to 22,500 in 1919; homesteading would help Hawaiians to “perpetuate” their race. These definitions suggest the logic of whitening, the “betterment” of native stock through the infusion of Caucasian blood. However, as history shows, the trust obligation between the federal government and Hawaiians has been repeatedly disavowed. Today, Ceded Lands are administered by the U.S. Military and the State’s Department of Land and Natural Resources.25 Most of Hawaiian Homes Lands, 130,000 acres, continues to be misappropriated by the State of Hawai‘i for use as airports, military bases, public schools, public parks, private homes, and county refuse sites. Meanwhile, as of 1991, over 20,000 families remain on the waiting list for homesteads.26 Eugenics also justified annexation by positing biological causes in the place of historically and culturally specific explanations. For example, the indices of so-called racial inferiority and degeneration—diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, syphilis, and tuberculosis—were results of contact and colonization, as Stannard has shown. As Kame‘eleihiwa points out, Hawaiians were not dying in the nineteenth century because they needed, as R. C. Wyllie had argued, the liberal cure—a plot of land: “Hawaiians were dying because of foreign diseases . . . In today’s world the Calvinist’s ludicrous prescription for health would be comparable to advising someone with AIDS that they should purchase a piece of land! What Hawaiians needed was medical care—more doctors and more medicine—not private ownership of ‘Āina” (1992: 202). The “criminality” Fred sees in Julian and other Hawaiians is caused by their dispossession, the degradation of their culture, and dissolution of their communities, not by race. The concept of criminal acts such as theft is also a western notion, as the accounts of Cook’s voyages reveal. Poverty and dispossession was caused by colonization and increasingly white American control of land and political power in Hawai‘i. Nor was the moral “degeneracy” which Calvinists read into Hawaiian cultural and spiritual practices the byproduct of racial inferiority or degeneration. American eugenics made it possible for white Americans to deny remedies for social ills which they themselves had helped to create; indeed, to deny the necessity for these remedies by arguing that these were not socially-derived problems but racially-derived ones which might be solved either by cultural and then political, and even perhaps racial assimilation, on the one hand, or extermination, on the other. If eugenics underwrote legal documents such as the HHCA, it also justified expansion. The Protestant Reverend Josiah Strong deploys eugenics discourse aimed at immigrants in justifying American imperialist policy. In the 1900 text Expansion under New World Conditions,27 Strong connected American imperialism in the Pacific to Anglo-Saxon superiority (1971: 7). Although he defined Anglo-Saxon in terms of language—“English-speaking peoples”—assimilation implies the racialized image of whiteness: “Anglo-Saxon assimilation is best illustrated by the United States, into whose current of life alien peoples

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and characteristics, in one, or at most two, generations, sink and disappear like snowflakes in a river” (187, ff. 1; 188; my italics). Immigrants or “alien peoples,” non-Anglo-Saxons, assimilate by becoming like white snowflakes, part of “one great race” (213). Further, Strong effaces alien (and Native) difference by figuring “alien peoples” as already white (snowflakes), thus presenting colonization (and its euphemism “assimilation”) as effortless, unproblematic, and natural. In seamlessly transporting this logic beyond the boundaries of the nation, Strong effaces the difference between settling a region and claiming prior nativity through the discourse of manifest destiny. In this strategic maneuver he displaces Hawaiians as “immigrants,” “aliens” in their own land. Strong suggests a process of racial whitening through settlement. He discusses the region almost exclusively in terms of material resources and population densities, concluding, “Thus most of the room for expansion of the race is precisely here” (165–66). Despite the obvious rhetoric of expansion, Strong claims that Anglo-Saxons were the destined first race to rule the region; other European nations controlled parts of the Pacific, but never its entirety. The long-awaited building of the Panama Canal occurred only at a point in history when the U.S. could take full advantage of access to the Pacific (212). For Strong, the Pacific is destined to be under Anglo-Saxon control, “in the hands of one great race, upon which [the Pacific people] confer decisive power” (213). Through the rhetoric of manifest destiny, Strong argues for Anglo-Saxon priority which precedes other European presences in the region and which precedes indigenous control of the region: the former are not chosen by God, and the latter are not capable of government. Holt’s novel invokes eugenics discourse and its metaphors of breeding out (whitening) in the figures of Kroa the Ape Boy and the stuffed monkeys. These figures allow Mark to distance himself from his “primitive” forefathers. In addition to these items in Fred’s Victorian parlor, Mark describes a display of “[f]ramed and glassed ‘studies’ in embroidery or petitpoint and threedimensional constructions of wild flowers arranged to represent a microcosm of nature” (10). Like the stuffed monkeys, the wildflowers present an artificially preserved sense of the past; both are “wild” things transformed into specimens by the framing and glass case. Kroa is similarly transformed by the framing and presence in the lithograph of a “‘noted’” scientist (8). His wildness has been tamed by science and by his being, as the caption suggests, part-human, a boy. The transformations of these wild creatures behind their frames and glass casings, and their further transformation within the space of the Victorian parlor into museumized oddities, curiosities, serve to distance the owners of the house from wildness through the discourse of science and civilized living. 28 The spider monkeys are “pets” preserved by taxidermy, Kroa is a “souvenir,” and the wild flowers are “studies” (8–10). Kroa’s wildness is further contained if we look to his probable historical referent, “Krao,” whose photograph (see Figure 1.1) was included in The Living Races of Man (1900), an ethnographic text subtitled, “A popular illustrated account of the customs, habits, pursuits, feasts and ceremonies of the races of mankind throughout the world.” The caption notes, “Krao” was a girl child of 6 to

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Figure 1.1 Kroa as pictured in The Living Races of Man

7 years of age found in “the forest of Laos, Burma” (Hutchinson et al. 1900: ii). She was exhibited in 1883 and 1887 by the Great Farini at the Royal Aquarium in London.29 The mistaken view that Krao’s hairiness and “ape-like peculiarities” suggested she was the “Missing Link” was disproved by J. G. Garson in 1883. However, the simultaneously scientizing and othering effect of the photographic frame is evident in both the content and context of the photograph. First, the sharp contrast between the fully as well as formally clothed man with Krao’s unclothed body suggests Krao is animal-like and not human, suggesting

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that her hairiness is her “coat” and substitutes for human signs of culture such as clothing. Simultaneously, the man’s obvious paternalistic and protective posture contrasts with Krao’s infantilizing pose and her diminutive size. Second, the studio setting and the obviously posed nature of the photograph suggest the “civilized” European audience for which the photo was taken, which further others Krao as regressive. Third, in arguing for the importance of “commercial education,” the textual accompaniment highlights the connection between the volume’s ethnographic aims and empire: “[I]f [Britain is] to maintain a great Imperial Policy and a lasting supremacy in trade, it must be through a better understanding of the needs and characteristics of the various peoples with whom we [British] are brought in contact” (ii). While the authors maintain that the terms for racial classification, “Caucasian, Mongolian, Polynesian, Negro, Negrito, and Papuan” continue to prove “convenient,” they point out that their collection avoided including impure types, “half-castes, or very mixed types” (iii–iv). They claim an authenticity through their use of photography as opposed to engraving which they maintain is “far from accurate” and “cannot be trusted” since the engraver is often unable to capture “the different types of human anatomy” which the authors believe distinguish between “a Polynesian or a Papuan and an African negro” (iv). Holt’s transformation of the female Krao to the male child Kroa suggests his interest in commenting on the way hapa masculinity troubles imperial binaries of human and animal, pure and mixed. This emphasis on maleness becomes clear when after Julian intimates his sexual relationship with his sister, Mark imagines himself as Tarzan. But he suppresses this wish: “I breathed deeply, spread my arms wide, and felt like bellowing Tarzan’s call. I suppressed this euphoric impulse and stalked off to find the children” (12; my italics). Kroa’s importance now becomes apparent. Tarzan, also thought to have been an ape-boy, certainly raised by apes, is a particularly comforting figure because he allows Mark to distance himself from Julian’s reference to “savage” customs (for example, chiefly incest) by claiming British aristocratic lineage and whiteness. This is in keeping with his unconscious identification with the midshipman. This view of himself as white, particularly British, occurs through an identification with Tarzan—who is, in fact, a British lord who achieves his humanity by proving his distance from the apes who raise him. Mark achieves his Britishness by distancing himself from wild things— apes, monkeys, and wildflowers—through scientization and temporal distancing. He declares the wildflower studies strange—“totally inimical to the present”— suggesting how their status as preserved and museumized objects evokes a temporal distancing which disconnects the “specimens” from attempts to construct a racially whitened present. However, Mark is not completely free of his Hawaiian-ness. He is unable to become Tarzan and “stalk[s] off ” to find Puna and the others. Mark is unable to become Tarzan not only because he is part-Hawaiian but also because Tarzan’s aristocratic lineage has been outmoded by annexation itself. Here, the historically significant connection between Britishness, the monarchy, and its acceptance of hapa haole is anachronistic, out of place in

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the world of American republicanism and its discourse of racial purity. Princess Ka‘iulani, the last heir apparent to the throne, was herself a hapa haole, the daughter of Princess Likelike and Archibald S. Cleghorn. Lili‘uokalani’s Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen constantly invokes connections between the Hawaiian and British monarchies—from Queen Victoria’s special reception of Queen Kapi‘olani and the then Princess Lili‘uokalani at the jubilee, to her claims that the Hawaiian monarchical system is more just and democratic than that of the sugar planter oligarchy, to her claim that Mrs. Grover Cleveland is worthy of the name of queen (1964: 338). Holt himself is named after John O. Dominis, the prince consort, and his genealogy links him to Lili‘uokalani’s lineage through several marriages. Holt also mentions with pride his family’s genealogical connection to two aristocratic figures, Lord George Paulet and Lucien Bonaparte. The former engineered a shortlived takeover of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i under Kamehameha III. As is well known, Admiral Thomas arrived in 1843 to return the monarchy, on behalf of the British Crown, to Kauikeaouli. Paulet is Holt’s great-great-grandfather, having fathered a girlchild, Hanakaulani-o-Kamamalu, through his relationship with Kamalo-o-Leleiohoku who herself is quite possibly a pi‘o daughter of Kauikeaouli. Hanakaulani-o-Kamamalu eventually married Owen Jones Holt who himself is descended from the union of a Tahitian princess and Lucien Bonaparte (Holt 1993: 280–84). The Holt and Bailey families, two prominent lines of Holt’s genealogy, were strong supporters of the monarchy, and Samuel Parker of the Parker Ranch (the historical counterpart for the Stevenson Ranch) was a confidant of the Queen as well as her appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Parker was one of six key loyalists whose lives the Queen saved by signing the deed of abdication. The notion of racial purity ascendant under American rule contrasts with the acceptance of mixing between Hawaiians and whites during the period of the British-inflected Hawaiian monarchy. The metaphor of racial purification becomes obvious in a scene involving Kroa. Eben Dinwiddie, the young heir to the Stevenson Ranch, ridicules the image of Kroa, in stark contrast to Mark’s initial uneasiness: “Kroa, The Ape Boy,” Eben said. Then he howled. I had to grab a chair as I doubled over with laughter. “We had one of those little monsters, too,” Eben said finally. “Used to scare the pants off us . . .” We laughed uncontrollably. (123) Eben’s howl, like Tarzan’s call, suggests Eben’s centrality as a figure of racial purification, of breeding out the Hawaiian. But their uncontrollable laughter and Eben’s admission that Kroa “scare[d] the pants off ” him implies the role that Kroa and wildness play in the conception of “Hawaiian” for these two hapa haole youths. Precisely, Kroa presents the fear of regression into racial Hawaiian-ness and the “primitive.” A more specific kind of whitening is evident in the royalist Stevenson family’s choice of ranch manager, Albert Baxter, an American annexationist. Their choice

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leads them to financial prosperity amid the ubiquitous loss of lands occurring in other hapa haole families. In other words, economic success in modern-day Hawai‘i requires that one put aside one’s old loyalties to the Anglo-inflected monarchy and “take advantage” of American expertise. Baxter, a “haole alii, a chief of today,” urges Mark to forget the past (121). In order for Eben to succeed, he must accept the passing of the monarchy, the loss of sovereignty, and identify with American interests, which he almost seems to have done. Hence, his howl and laughter at seeing the lithograph of Kroa. The process of Americanization is also evident in the central conflict troubling Mark’s coming of age, the irreconcilability of American cowboy and Hawaiian chiefly masculinities. Fred and Julian are, here, the central figures. According to Fred, a “real” man isn’t “afraid of unbroken horses” (64). The cowboy valuation of breaking in horses suggests a taming of wildness, “domestication” of perceived Hawaiian “primitiveness.” Cowboy masculinity recalls the notion of manifest destiny and the role of ranching in “domesticating” the wilderness, and even further how the Pacific was seen as the last frontier in U.S. westward expansion. Andrew Ross notes how the western genre mythologizes the cowboy as masculine national identity in a period of territorial aggrandizement. The implication that Fred’s breaking horses also applies to his Hawaiian wives is a key aspect of cowboy masculinity, “the legitimation of wild misogyny through the codes of maverick male autonomy” (1990: 88). Cowboy masculinity also works to justify “genocide through the codes of ‘manifest destiny’” (88). These hapa haole cowboys enact a cultural and eventual racial genocide against their Hawaiian selves. This conflict is played out between Julian and Fred. Unlike his brother-in-law, Julian refuses to learn cowpunching, has a “yellow streak,” and fails to “conform to the Waimea ideal of manhood” (64). Nonconformance with cowboy masculinity extends to sexuality, Julian’s “māhū” tendencies as a sign of his “primitive” nature. Fred warns Mark: “‘Keep your eyes open, boy! That fella’s no good! He’s from Waipio Valley, and people from there are pretty primitive. Tell him to keep away from your room! He has no business being in there!’” (4). In the Protestant American present, aikāne and le‘ale‘a translate into moral degeneration, laziness, perversion, poverty, illness, and criminality (64). As Mark notes, Julian is Fred’s “Prince of Darkness,” the sexual, racial, and moral other against which Fred’s idea of cowboy masculinity defines itself (64). The sexual implications of Julian’s chiefly descent haunt Mark in Waipi‘o where he undergoes a chiefly Lono initiation ritual with Abraham Hanohano, Julian’s uncle. After a prayer, both man and boy swim in the ocean: “I stripped off my clothes and ran yelling like a savage into the pounding surf” (178; my italics). Mark hints at what for him are the disturbing implications of same-sex contact: “[Hanohano] embraced me with a gentle certainty. I sank my nose into his chest muscles and drank in the smell of the sea, clinging still to his silken skin. He pressed me closer as though to give me the strength of his mana. I pulled away. Memory of the early morning intimacy at the beach made me tremble” (181). Puali also notes the possibility of Mark’s ritual with Hanohano (179). The process of whitening directed toward hapa haole masculinity is perhaps

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most evident in the ranch’s program to produce a pure strain of Herefords by eradicating a herd of wild longhorn bulls (149). This program refers to an actual effort by Parker Ranch manager Alfred Wellington Carter to shoot the untameable cattle for hides, tallow, and meat. He demanded his cattle be of “pure blood” and “good conformation” (Brennan 1974: 131, 48). As noted earlier, genocide and its justification, manifest destiny, are key aspects of the Western genre and cowboy identity. The ranch’s decision to breed pure Herefords is a metaphor for the genocide of Hawaiians through both dilution (whitening) and curtailed reproduction of “degenerates.” The novel’s eradication program is instituted by Baxter, an American descended from “old haole families which had not mixed their bloods” (117). The ranch purification logic—which contrasts with Hawaiian genealogy— extends to the Americanized Stevenson heirs as well. At Puna’s birthday lū‘au, the ranch men discuss pedigrees, referring tacitly to Eben’s own breeding. Mark feels his own ignorance and exclusion from the conversation: “As they talked, the older men directed glances at Eben which were both pedagogic and deferential. I looked at him with envy and admiration. Judge Peyton was saying something about recessive traits. I was avidly interested in genealogies . . . but when it came to pedigrees, I was easily lost. I walked away toward the stables” (117; my italics). In this passage, the men simultaneously make use of Eben pedagogically, as an example of recessive traits, specifically Hawaiian and perhaps British sympathies, even while they defer to him. Mark’s lack of knowledge of pedigrees implies his exclusion from American business circles and its discourse of racial purity, while his skill at genealogical recounting affirms a particularly Hawaiian notion of relations between people, the perpetuation of mana and history rather than purely genetic characteristics. While the ranch breeding program is a metaphor for genocide, in a more Hawaiian sense, the slaughter of the wild bull—and its precursor the wild boar— are not merely “metaphors” but rather a physical enactment, the killing of sacred beings or ‘aumākua associated with sexuality and fertility. Throughout the narrative Fred refers to Julian in terms that recall the male pig god Kamapua‘a, one of whose kinolau is that of a black boar. When Fred and Julian engage in a whip fight, Fred calls him a black pig (105). He curses Julian with the words “laho pilau” and “He ia ule palaho!” (106). The first, “laho pilau,” indicates a dirty male animal, “laho” indicating the testicles or scrotum, and “pilau” meaning dirty or contaminated. “He ia ule palaho” curses the penis (ule) as rotten, putrid, decayed, or corrupt. The Hawaiian phrase for boar is pua‘a laho. In pre-contact times, this phrase applied exclusively to “playboys” and promiscuous men (Pukui et al. 1972: 93). The pig-god Kamapua‘a also took two principal forms: either a large or very small mischievous pig, and a handsome young male lover (Kame‘eleihiwa 1996: xii). Significantly, Fred allows the boar to kill himself with his own tusks, suggesting the ways these scenes of slaughter turn back upon themselves, enacting a kind of self-destruction. The slaughter of the wild bull (pipi laho) elaborates further upon the issue of genocide. At Moriyama’s home, Ernest Moluhi indicates that he will sleep next to Mark because the following morning he must “‘try get da pipi laho huihui’”

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(152). Interestingly, while the literal translation of the phrase is that Moluhi will herd or round up (huihui) the bulls, another meaning of hu‘ihu‘i includes a cold tingling associated with love. Perhaps Moluhi’s statement suggests another playful homoerotic gesture toward Mark typical of le‘ale‘a. However, hu‘ihu‘i, as one of the ‘ili ‘ōuli or skin signs, also indicates 1) a cold, numb, or tingling feeling accompanied by a vague foreboding conveyed by a spirit; and 2) a feeling of sudden coldness which indicates a spirit has sent an icy wind as a warning (Pukui et al. 1983: 92–93). After Fred and his friends bait and slaughter the wild bull, Mark, deeply disturbed, rides home on the gelding Black Beauty: “The panic was on me again. My hands and feet were tingling . . . Anger added to my panic . . . What I was doing was against the most sacred rules of horsemanship. It was indulgent, wanton! Ka uha‘uha a me ke lapuwale! We raced on, both horse and boy under a spell. I felt a wicked, utterly debauching exhilaration on top of my panic. I felt totally mad!” (160–61). The tingling in his extremities recalls the skin portent hu‘ihu‘i. His sexual initiation the night before (the tingling of love) is coupled with a foreboding, the threat of extermination and genocide represented in the death of the herded bull (pipi laho huihui). Terms such as “wicked,” “‘uha‘uha” (extravagant), “lapuwale” (vain), “debauching exhilaration,” and “mad” suggest Mark’s sense of desperate abandonment to le‘ale‘a customs by which Kamehameha III attempted to revive his culture and people. The layering of the debauching exhilaration and the panic has everything to do with the way in which le‘ale‘a was at times a tactic of resistance to threatened extermination. The slaughter of the two male animals associated with fertility (pipi laho and pua‘a laho) indicates the precise and causative relation between the ranching interest in purebred cattle and laws such as the HHCA (supported by ranching interests) which were intended to produce legal “genocide.” Mark’s panic is caused not just by the genocidal implications of the slaughter, but also by a deeper understanding of the role of genocide in the U.S. imperial project. Mark’s reaction to the slaughter brings together the discourses of race and sex—the memory of miscegenation—with imminent death: “The memory of the night [with Kimiko] surged up. The smell of maile and fern mixed with the distinct odor of raw beef suddenly had me almost retching” (160). At the house of the ditchman, Moriyama, Mark witnesses Kapua Gomes’s failed attempt to rape Moriyama’s young picture bride wife, Kimiko. Later, Mark awakens to Kimiko’s sobbing. A curious scene ensues in which Kimiko seduces the sexually-uninitiated Mark with the aid of masks. Kimiko is represented as an exotic Japanese woman, the orientalized “geisha.” Playing the samisen and furnishing a dainty repast, she moves about “deft ly and continuously to serve” (152, 154). Fred remarks: “‘Very efficient and wifely! . . . Very humble, as all women should be. You can’t beat these picture brides!’” (152). Her rejection of the darker partHawaiian cowboy, Gomes, and her seduction of the white-appearing Mark is curious. The scene suggests another orientalist tale, that of Madama Butterfly, Pierre Loti’s story of a Japanese woman who gives up the possibility of a respectable life in Japanese society for her attraction to an American naval officer. But even more than this, the scene suggests the role Hawai‘i has played as U.S.

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go-between or stepping stone to the east. Kimiko rejects the more Hawaiianappearing Gomes and seduces the more haole Mark precisely because Hawaii’s annexation to the U.S. as a territory was “bought” with the lease of Pearl Harbor to the U.S. Navy. During World War II, Hawaii’s military importance to U.S. intentions for Asia, its competition with Japan, becomes undeniable. The future of Hawai‘i, Holt suggests, lies in allegiance to American business interests in the Pacific and Asia which ultimately motivates U.S. military occupation of Hawai‘i. Mark’s innocence and virginity, in contrast to Kimiko’s predatory seduction, suggests how Hawai‘i is being claimed unknowingly by larger global political and economic players, the U.S. and Japan. He wears the mask of white American ascendancy to Kimiko’s stereotypical mask of Japanese feminine submissiveness; however, Mark’s mask effaces his Hawaiian-ness and Hawaii’s past while Kimiko’s disguises an aggressive and brutal Japanese militarism in the Pacific. Thus, Mark’s first heterosexual experience is colored by contemporary international relations in the Pacific region. It seems clear that Hawaiian sexual practices have no place in the new scheme of things. Mark’s panic is brought on by an irreconcilable contradiction: the smell of maile and fern—connoting Hawaiian sexuality and fertility—and the odor of raw beef—evoking American business interests killing off and breeding out “wild” Hawaiian-ness. Holt recalls the connection of maile with sexuality: “Ginger alone is fragrant enough to lure one into a fantasy world of eternal pleasure and gratification. When maile is added to ginger, the smell is enough to push one into a dream-state filled with erotic expectation . . .” (1993: 396). What produces Mark’s panic response is precisely the fact that Hawaiian sexuality, that of Kapua Gomes, is being “edged out,” bred out of Hawaii’s present and its future. Mark’s and Gomes’s behavior prior to their slaughter of the bull evokes the vanishing and threatened le‘ale‘a. As the cowboys make maile leis while waiting for the wild bull’s appearance, the men reveal their masculinity in more Hawaiian terms: “We laughed, joyous, as though preparing the rites of the hula goddess Laka. There was almost a feminine gentleness in the way the paniolos pursued the making of the maile leis. They would change if the wild bull joined its cow” (158). Kapua bestows a lei on Mark and plants a “hairy kiss” on his cheek. Ernest Moluhi comments: “Kolohe no keia keiki hapa haole hanohano,” suggesting that Mark is a mischievous or naughty half-white child of the gentry. Mark’s “cheeky” behavior suggests this playfulness and mock-homosexual teasing: “‘Kiss me anyhow,’ I said with bravado and turned my cheek” (159). However, Mark’s observation that their playful “feminine gentleness” would change (158) upon the bull’s appearance suggests the conflict between the American ranch’s project of breeding out wildness and Hawaiian sexual practices; this signals a crisis for Hawaiian fertility and reproduction. The scene is doubly ironic because it suggests that the political and economic ascendancy of Americans has internally divided these hapa haole cowboys and engaged them in a kind of self-slaughter, self-genocide: their American cowboy personas are forced to enact a kind of annihilation of their Hawaiian selves, if they are to have a place in Hawaii’s future. Mark’s hellish ride on the gelding Black Beauty revels

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in what missionary prohibition would term wickedness and debauchery, because it suggests Kauikeaouli’s fierce attempt to revive the old ways, knowing full well the political and ethical implications. This, then, is the reason for Mark’s panic response. Unable to find a path between the threat of genocide and the missionary prohibition against le‘ale‘a, he responds with flight. Understanding Mark’s trauma, then, requires attention not only to the legal and political context but also to Hawaiian ways of knowing, such as ‘ili ‘ōuli. These everyday practices complicate the explanations of trauma that would cast these modes as pathological symptoms and not as modes of spiritual guidance which they are. For skin signs warn Mark about the intersection of genocide, race, and land on the terrain of a multiply dialectical masculinity—American cowboy masculinity and Hawaiian aikāne and le‘ale‘a sexuality. These racial and sexual identities, in this context of U.S. empire, are irreconcilable. But the slaughtered wild longhorns are politically significant, being descendants of cattle given by Vancouver to Kamehameha I.30 They suggest the way legal genocide naturalizes annexation and the abrogation of native sovereignty. Mark’s final traumatic episode is brought on, like the others, by an internal conflict, this time between competing notions of sovereign authority after annexation: Hawaiian notions of genealogy and mana, on the one hand, and “modern” American notions of wealth and class privilege, on the other. While awaiting passage for Honolulu, Mark meets Mrs. Charles K. L. White and her two sons, students at Choate and Princeton. Though of low chiefly status, they have benefited financially by accepting the passing of the old Hawaiian-British ways. Their nineteenth-century great-grandfather “had adjusted to his time, had been granted substantial landholdings, and left his family enormously rich” (190). The transformation of surnames from “Keaka” to “White” indicates their Americanization, one which erases Hawaiian spirituality, as “ke aka” can be translated as “shadow,” whose significance becomes clear below. Their mother speaks in a “clipped Boston accent” suggesting the homeland of Protestant missionary families (190). Mark’s future could take two forms: he could attempt to become an ali‘i of today, like Baxter and the Whites; or, he could take up the legacy of Kamehameha, the path Hanohano marks out for him. His initiation as a young chief progresses at Pu‘u Koholā Heiau, for the kahu (guardian, caretaker) upon discovering Mark’s lineage, offers to teach him the history of the Heiau, the history of Kamehameha’s rise to power and the eventual formation of the Hawaiian nation. This history involves Kamehameha’s connection to the war god Kū, in particular, the splitting of the powers of the Mō‘ī between, on the one hand, Kīwala‘o, who was granted succession, and on the other, Kamehameha himself, who was granted subordinate status through his designation as guardian of the idol Kū. Kamehameha thus controlled, to some extent, Kīwala‘o’s decisions to make war (Kamakau 1992: 107). Kīwala‘o dies in battle against his cousin Kamehameha, precipitating a civil war on the island of Hawai‘i which marks his rise to power. Kamehameha secures his ascendancy by sacrificing at Pu‘u Koholā another son of Kalani‘ōpu‘u, his rival Keōua Kuahu‘ula. Like Eben, Keōua had a twin brother, Keōua Pe‘e-‘ale. Mark’s experience at Pu‘u

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Koholā, with its nationalist subtext, then, suggests that Mark, as Kamehameha’s descendant and chief-initiate, in order to accept the chiefly imposition which his genealogy makes upon him, must overcome Keōua’s modern-day counterpart, another ascendant twin, Eben Dinwiddie, representative of the rising Americanized hapa haole elite. Mark’s genealogical connection to Kamehameha is crucial to his present actions because, as Kame‘eleihiwa argues, a person’s identity is revealed in ancestral names: “Hawaiian genealogies are the history of the Hawaiian people. Ali‘i Nui . . . are the totality of their genealogy, which is comprised of the character of their ancestors. This is the sum total of their identity”(1992: 21). When the kahu chants one branch of Mark’s family genealogy, he evokes Kamehameha’s deeds and accomplishments in creating a kingdom and nation unified for the first time under a single ruler. Even the events at the harbor shadow Kamehameha’s first sacrifice to Kū at the Heiau. In Kawaihae Bay, cattle are being loaded onto a ship. The loading is interrupted by the appearance of sharks who begin feeding on the steers (192).31 While Mark views the sharks as “destructive beasts,” again evoking the discourse of Hawaiian wildness and savagery, the kahu maintains that the sharks are “whimsical” and at “play,” merely annoyed at the loading of the steers and as ‘aumākua merely “protect[ing] those who are theirs” (193). The kahu explains that Kamehameha sat at Pu‘u Koholā, and at the right moment “ran down the hill and into the waters where he met the shark head on. The shark had the name of Keoua Kuahuula, one of his most hated enemies. In the heat of anger, the Great One stunned the shark with blows, opened its jaws and tore them asunder until the shore was red with the blood of the enemy” (193–94). Kamakau tells a very different story of Keōua’s death and his final attempt to find the one who had engineered his death by sorcery: Keōua cuts off the end of his penis, an act called the Death of Uli. The kahu’s re-telling of Kamehameha’s fierce defeat of Keōua is highly metaphorical and does not coincide with Kamakau’s rather tame version that focuses instead on Kamehameha’s craftiness.32 The kahu’s story evokes “Hula Manō nō Kalani‘ōpu‘u” (The Shark Hula for Kalani‘ōpu‘u) which invokes his ‘aumākua. ‘Aumākua are half-human, half-divine beings who could assist their keepers through sacred (kapu) supernatural agency and power (Pukui and Korn 1973: 3–4). The sharks feeding on the Stevenson steers suggest that Keōua’s attempt to discover the sorcerer who caused his death has perhaps come to pass, for the sharks seem to be protecting Hawai‘i from rapacious American businessmen. Notice that the sharks feed on the steers and do not attack the Hawaiian man who swims in the bloodied water attempting to scare them off (192). Nevertheless, Mark’s final traumatic episode occurs when the kahu urges him to remain at the Heiau and learn the history. Mark experiences a vision of the Heiau as it might have been during Kamehameha’s time: As I back away from the old man, chiefs are gathering in the brilliant noonday sun. Attendants carry kahili, tabu sticks, and images held aloft on long poles. The walls of the heiau teem with wooden sculptures of angry, protective dei-

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ties. The oracle tower, covered with white tapa, rises fifty feet from the lower platform. Under the tower, kahunas in white tapa, stand chanting prayers. The chiefs take their seats on the row of stones along the edge of the higher platform. They wear crested feather helmets and large-patterned cloaks of red and yellow feathers. The Great One arrives. His helmet and cloak are a purity of rarest yellow feathers. He sits. Drums beat. A chant is intoned— vibrant, vehement. The chiefs sit immobile, and the scene dissolves into its own eternity. The old man and I are alone. Someone is calling my name. (195) The novel ends evasively with Mark running “pell-mell down the hillside” (195). The shift to present verb tense suggests a kind of transcendence of the temporal distancing that—through discussion of Kroa and the stuffed monkeys—has been shown to prevent the primitivized past from becoming part of the living present. The importance of the present verb tense can be explained by Hawaiian notions of time and genealogy. Genealogy, the record of the past, was used to determine future courses of action. The past, ka wā mamua, literally means “the time in front or before”; the future ka wā mahope, means “the time which comes after or behind”: “It is as if the Hawaiian stands firmly in the present, with his back to the future, and his eyes fi xed upon the past, seeking historical answers for present-day dilemmas. Such an orientation is to the Hawaiian an eminently practical one, for the future is unknown, whereas the past is rich in glory and knowledge” (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 22–23). The shift to the present, then, indicates a genealogical connection between Mark’s future and his ancestral past, the founding of the nation. Mark’s shift to the present tense at first suggests the immediacy of traumatic experiences, the sense that one is experiencing events all over again as he re-tells the episode. Even more so than in the case of Mark’s midshipman dream, one wonders what is the precedent for experiencing this ceremony except through a kind of ancestral memory which again evokes the uncanny, for this is a vision, not an imagining of a historical account or of a story told to him. Mark’s vision would not be a traumatic acting-out but rather an example of hō‘ailona, a “sign, omen, or portent” which often leads to hō‘ike, a revelation, knowing, seeing, receiving of knowledge from the gods (Pukui et al. 1983: 54). Among the various examples of hō‘ailona—winds, mists, rainbows, cloud formations, waves, and bodily sensations—are visions such as akakū. The term akakū derives from aka meaning shadow, living person’s spirit or “mystic essence” and kū meaning to stand or halt. The meaning of the word then is “standing or halted shadow” and refers to a vision seen when fully awake and in daylight.33 Visions and voices do not harm; rather, they tell you something, advise, or help (Pukui et al. 1983: 11, 15). Why then does the narrative cease abruptly with Mark’s hysterical run down the hillside? On the one hand, his fear might be indicative of his alienation from the old traditions, the way in which his culture has become illegible due to the loss of elders as well as Christian and colonizing imperatives. Unable to read the

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hō‘ailona (sign) and obtain hō‘ike (revelation) to guide his actions, Mark refrains from accepting the akakū as an invitation to spiritual knowledge and a call to take up his leadership role. It is a guiding vision, but the young Mark, unable to read the signs, views it as another terrible reminder of the perceived depravity and primitive-ness of Hawaiian culture. These negative interpretations of his culture are precisely what have haunted him throughout the novel in the mode of partial trauma. The sudden silence at the end of the novel suggests the way in which trauma lies at the limit of language and telling. It is important, then, that we do not read, unlike the other traumatic incidents, the careful record of his bodily responses to the event. And, as Freud and Pierre Janet point out, language is central to both trauma and its cure: “the crucial factor that determines the repetition of trauma is the presence of mute, unsymbolized, and unintegrated experiences” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995: 167). Repetition and traumatic acting out occur precisely because the traumatic experience is not integrated into memory which would constitute the conscious narration of the event through symbols and words; in traumatic acting out the body and its repeated actions tell the story unconsciously. If a person does not remember the event(s), he acts out, he “reproduces [the event] not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without knowing, of course, that he is repeating, and in the end, we understand that this is his way of remembering” (Freud 1955a: 150). For Janet, integrating the event with other memories constitutes a cure for trauma because it makes conscious what was heretofore unconscious and not verbalizable (1990). Trauma has been called, after all, “the extreme limit case” which threatens the meaning-components of language along with its classifications, categories, and comparisons (LaCapra 1994: 65). In Waimea Summer Mark’s storytelling is a kind of testimony which evidences healing and working through. For the most part, he consciously remembers, describes, and sometimes evaluates the events of trauma that pepper the narrative. However, the fi nal silence suggests that a complete healing has not occurred. It implies that complete historical recovery of the event or events is not possible and that repetition continues into the present, even along with the actual writing of history. This suggests that trauma cannot always be healed and it may require of us “the recognition of loss that cannot be made good: scars that will not disappear and even wounds that will not heal” (LaCapra 1994: 66). The inconclusive, unfinished ending also suggests the impossibility for full interpellation of resistant, colonized subjectivity. It suggests the inadequacy of the Bildungsroman as the form for narrating anti-colonial identity and resistance. The truncated story that Holt tells presents a radical alternative to the fetishized narrative of complete recuperation and recovery of a lost past, or even of the protagonist’s healing testimony of his experiences, which psychoanalysis tends to uphold as cure. Such historical narratives create phantasmatic investments in totality, a sense that the ravages of colonialism can be made good, that history can be, to some degree, made whole, put aside, forgotten, and eventually erased. Holt’s novel critiques this idealization of complete history by presenting to us a past that is replete with fragments of history, often untraceable and

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unexplainable in their recurrence, a narrative of incompleteness and ongoing dissociation which suggests a psyche that is not healed, a history that is as yet untold and perhaps not wholly translatable. The protagonist’s experience with history has led to an extreme limit case which bars history altogether. The question arises, then, does the novel challenge traditional psychoanalytic theorizations of trauma? Psychoanalysis would argue that trauma is “healed” through a reconciliation, an acceptance of a narrative or explanation of loss. But Holt’s protagonist experiences recurring panic responses that differ slightly from each other in cause and effect. Rather than reliving a single circumscribed event per se, Mark re-experiences in actual contemporary events a collision of worlds that characterizes conflicts of the first century of contact. Holt’s novel suggests that the present—not merely the subject/protagonist—is haunted; the very cultural fabric of contemporary Hawai‘i is imbued with these past conflicts between American, British, East Asian, and Hawaiian interests. In discussing the connection between repetition and social reality, Michelle A. Massé has argued that the difference between marital gothic and soldier’s shellshock lies in the continuance of originating events of trauma: “the heroine of marital Gothic will always reawaken to the still-present actuality of her trauma, because the gender expectations that deny her identity are woven into the very fabric of her culture, which perpetuates her trauma while denying its existence” (1992: 15). Similarly, Hawaiian identity continues to be the site of colonial violence precisely because of the continued lack of political transformation which would allow Hawaiians to redefine their own identities and modes of belonging. One aspect of a “cure” involves a transformation of the cultural fabric that perpetuates the traumatic repetition, namely the restoration of sovereignty and self-determination, specifically an end to American and foreign occupation. Why is the traditional psychoanalytic cure not sufficient? Namely because this is not a case of repression of a past event per se but a situation in which the social, political, and economic reality of life in Hawai‘i today is one of ongoing colonization. Theorizations of trauma that pathologize victims of atrocities as “disordered” must be re-examined. In its pathologizing gestures, the clinical language of trauma tends to mirror the victimization that is itself pathological—torture or genocide, for example. As David Becker argues, “Is it a disorder if a person develops symptomatology after having witnessed the killing of his family, for example? Would it not be more correct to consider somebody disordered who does not become ill after such an experience?” (1995: 103–4). Further, are the individuals and the society that condones and perpetrates such atrocities not “disordered”? Trauma and the disordered body, then, is a manifestation of loss and of the violence of ongoing colonization. To create the narrative cure under these conditions would involve reconciling oneself to the fundamental lack of transformation within disturbed political and social relations. As Holt’s novel shows, traumatic realism refuses to articulate this encompassing reconciliation, insisting instead on the reality of the inscription of trauma that is a manifestation of ongoing colonization.

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Recounting the past, telling new futures Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree and the “tropical” cure

“The real ‘histories’ of our region have yet to be written. We must write them . . . whether these ‘histories’ take the form of straight history or poetry or drama or novels . . .” Albert Wendt (1973: 46)

In Leaves of the Banyan Tree Albert Wendt articulates the decolonizing potential of literature, an alternative to scholarly histories of the Pacific Islands. History from the ground up was already a burning question for Wendt a decade earlier when he wrote his MA thesis on the Samoan resistance movement, the Mau. Entitled “Guardians and Wards, a Study of the Origins, Causes, and the First Two Years of the Mau in Western Samoa” (1965), his thesis culminated in a peculiarly literary chapter, a dialogue between the historian and his conscience about the problems of interpretation in the writing of history.1 Modifying the then major study of the Mau by F. M. Keesing written some 30 years before, Wendt argued that the Mau represented not the disintegration of Samoan society but rather its persistence in the face of foreign domination. After the publication of Leaves, Wendt would call for a “new Oceania,” one premised not on a revival but a transformation of the past: “the creation of cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts” (1983a: 76). He has, more recently, celebrated the resilience of Pacific Islands cultures, the “survival and dynamic adaptation,” the creation of new forms through the indigenization of western ones, including the novel (1995: 3). Pacific literatures have incorporated aspects of Latin American fiction: “The so-called magic realism of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez has also entered our literature. So now we have a complex and expansive blend of realism and magic realism in our writing” (4). At the heart of this influence are “the techniques of oral story-telling and other oral traditions” (4). This chapter turns to the often ignored connection between magic realism and orality, specifically the oral representation of the everyday stories of colonial repression and popular resistance.2 The “marvelous” within magic realism, after all, has more to do with the official denial of the reality of life under tyranny and social injustice (Alegría 1986: 117). Magic

Recounting the past, telling new futures 65 realism privileges stories and memories of survival and resistance, often what official histories appropriate or exclude. The oral and the everyday that Wendt sought to uncover in his thesis, however, were not without their dangers and burdens. In the preface, Wendt cryptically states: “[f]earing for [his] safety,” he chose to withhold information which could “prove ‘harmful’ to the reputation of certain Mau leaders (now dead) and their families (now living)” (1965: v). Wendt’s novel tells perhaps a “truer” version of history, not via the realist novel which mimics history, but through magic realism’s shadowy, metaphorical, and parodic representation of the past. In the process he refigures both Samoan history and magic realism itself—Samoanizes it, if you will—by critiquing colonial culture as it has been absorbed into the fa‘a Sāmoa (the Samoan way or custom). Simultaneously, the novel interrogates aspects of native culture transformed by the accommodation of western forms. Leaves was written after Wendt’s return to Samoa upon completing his education in New Zealand. It appeared in 1979, 17 years after independence. Set in the imaginary village of Sapepe on the island of Upolu, the novel details the confl ict between older Samoan practices and western modernity, between subsistence and capitalist economies. Two chiefs, Tauilopepe (Tauilo) and the storeowner Malo, compete to establish profitable European-style plantations. To gain more credit at the store, Tauilo conducts a tryst with Malo’s wife, Moa. In the process, he betrays his wife Lupe, his son Pepe, and his father’s friend, Toasa, the senior orator chief (tu‘ua). Toasa’s and Lupe’s deaths, reflective of the declining influence of the old ways, spark Pepe’s open rebellion against his father, for which he is expelled from school, banished from the village, and sent to prison for burgling his father’s store. Upon his release, Pepe marries a golddigger, Susana, and lives in the urban backwater of the Vaipe with his friends, a dwarf named Tagata and a former wrestler named Lafoga. Amid their sense of despair, Tagata commits suicide and Pepe dies of tuberculosis while writing an account of his life (Book II of the novel). Soon after, a hurricane destroys Tauilo’s plantation. He must rebuild it with the help of a mysterious stranger, Galupo, who claims to be his illegitimate son. Set in the second half of the twentieth century up to independence in 1962, the novel’s characters and events resonate with historical figures and moments of resistance under the colonial period of the first half of the century. Through a method that exposes the historical layers beneath contemporary Samoan culture, Wendt critiques the process of indigenization, juxtaposing the colonial presences of the Church, plantation capitalism, and the law with older modes of subsistence and resistance. The best-known of these movements, the Mau, objected to the injustice and ineptitude of New Zealand rule which culminated in the horrific deaths of one-fift h of the population in the 1918 influenza epidemic. These movements consistently maintained the role of orators (tulāfale) central to fa‘a Sāmoa. In the novel Pepe, Toasa, and Tagata show how colonial administrations attempted—and failed—to disempower orator chiefs through a politics of infantilization and criminalization. Figures such as Malo and Tauilo reject this legacy of resistance, pursuing instead prestige and status (central to

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Samoan society) through the mimicry of colonial power. These tensions within fa‘a Sāmoa complicate the future of the independent nation, posing further challenges for decolonization. These postcolonial contradictions blossom in the disturbing figure of Galupo who appropriates both the authority of traditional oratory and the narrative of resistance for his own ends.

Fanua and the plantation system The novel privileges orality from its opening scene, Tauilopepe and Toasa’s card game. After meditating on his debts to the storeowner Malo and feeling somehow cheated, Tauilo hears of the latest western invention to appear in Samoa, the “flying machines.” He recalls the colonial government’s radio program emphasizing progress toward “a higher standard of living” (10). While cheerfully beating Tauilo at cards, Toasa tells of a man who made a fortune in copra (dried coconut): “He collected about ten tons [of copra]. Wrecked his wife, children, aiga [descent group],3 and horse doing it. The palagi [or European]4 trader gave him all the credit he wanted while he was slaving to get his copra, and when it was ready told him the money it brought was just enough to pay the debt he’d run up at the trader’s store. Poor ignorant fellow! He tried to kill the palagi trader. Was arrested and charged with assault and put in jail!” (10–11) As the spittle from Toasa’s laughter peppers Tauilo’s face, Tauilo suspects the old man is laughing at him. Annoyed, he calls Toasa on his habit of cheating: “When [Tauilo] caught Toasa’s right hand sweeping up a card he had hidden in the folds of his lāvalava,5 ‘Stop cheating!’ [Tauilo] heard himself say loud and clear. ‘Every night you insult me by cheating!’” (11). Failing to comprehend Toasa’s lesson, Tauilo angrily stomps out of the fale. The man who found himself in jail is a “[p]oor ignorant fellow” according to Toasa because he failed to see that he was never meant to win at the plantation “game.” The plantation economy is a “rigged” system that promises wealth but actually enslaves Samoans to the wealthy traders. The only way Tauilo can avoid being tricked by traders like Malo is to cheat, to have a card up one’s sleeve—or lāvalava, as the case may be. This scene of humorous storytelling signals a larger critique about the plantation system’s destabilization of social relations. Toasa expands upon the idea of the plantation as card game when he describes its effect on the older subsistence culture: His ancestors had taken from [the bush], after appeasing it with prayer and ritual, only what they needed, had cleared only small areas for food gardens . . . They had believed that the gods and the land and the bush and the sea and all other living creatures were indivisibly part of that perpetual cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. They had drawn boundaries over the land

Recounting the past, telling new futures 67 from the shore to the mountain ridge, but it had been for ownership, not to burn and clear the land for farming and profits. Ownership of land gave meaning . . . to the titles and status to their aiga . . . When the papalagi [or Europeans] came they outlawed the bush. They bought land . . . with guns, cheap goods, and lies. Then with fire and steel they drove the bush and gods inland, and erected barbed-wire fences. All for copra. With the missionaries, these papalagi settlers shattered the tapu that had ensured the survival of that cycle in which man had respected all other living things. Now Toasa was witnessing his own people continue that process of destruction . . . The deck of cards had been cut years before, even before these men were born, and he, Toasa, had lost. (62–63; my italics) The razing of the bush and the shattering of the tapu (by eating ‘āiga gods) desacralized and commodified the land. The plantation system is a “deck of cards” which has dealt Toasa a losing hand. Yet, this commodified relation is pursued by Tauilo who builds a government-style plantation, “unbelievable acres and acres of palms under which cattle grazed, orderly, neat, and profitable” (43). But, for Toasa, this system creates dependency, not progress, for “Samoans could no longer do without [Europeans] and what they had brought, were bringing, and would continue to bring” (36). Tauilo mimics European planters when he buys a pālagi-style home in Apia, one built by a German planter who died at the age of 80 because, as rumor had it, an aitu (spirit) 6 scared him to death. These details prove prophetic and foreshadow Tauilo’s own end at the hands of another aitu, Galupo. Tauilo gains entrance into Apia high society by holding parties at his home for pālagi and rich afakasi (part-European, part-Samoan persons). His Samoan relatives are not allowed to attend except as servants: Pepe plays the “barman” but is not permitted to drink, thus marking him as a “native.” (Consumption of alcohol by natives was illegal under colonial rule.) To understand why the plantation system is a game at which one could never win, we must look at the history of the plantation economy that became the basis for colonial control of Samoa. German colonial policy under Bismarck relied on already-existing trade and plantation holdings to establish a charter (Freibriefen) system. Chartered companies regulated trade, levied taxes and duties, took possession of all “unowned” land, and concluded contracts for land and labor with local inhabitants. In Western Samoa, the firm Godeff roy and Son profited from civil wars between Samoan groups in the early 1860s. The company’s agents traded muskets for extensive lands depopulated by wars and famine. Fraudulent practices were the order of the day on both sides (Hempenstall 1978: 26; Meleisea 1987b: 36). By 1879, the company, under Theodor Weber, had amassed 61,500 hectares of Upolu land, much of it ill-gotten—through debased currency and trading guns at inflated prices (Hempenstall 1978: 26–67). Weber’s introduction of new growing and processing methods had far-reaching economic effects, making the islands—which had held the major share of the market in

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coconut oil—mere suppliers of raw material in the German industrial system. Prior to the introduction of Weber’s method, Samoans extracted and traded the oil themselves. Weber’s new methods, focused on large-scale planting and drying of copra, made the industry less rewarding for the small-scale production methods used by Samoans (Meleisea 1987b: 35–36). In 1879 Godeffroy and Son was bought out by Deutsche Handels und Plantagen-Gesellschaft der Südsee Inselnzu Hamburg (DHPG) which later merged with other firms located in the Marshall, Brown, and Providence Islands to form a charter company, the Jaluit Gesellschaft, whose influence extended to the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Mariana Islands. At the turn of the century, the first German Administrator Wilhelm Solf attempted to bring Samoans under the plantation system by requiring every Samoan matai (head of ‘āiga) to plant 50 palms annually on unused land in order, he claimed, to offset the decline in production during the civil war (Meleisea 1987b: 35). In 1901 a poll tax was levied to pay the salaries of government officials. Samoans were required to sell their copra to a trader in return for German marks, thus supplying DHPG with a cheap source of copra for export. Copra traders cheated Samoans through the use of faulty scales. Part of Solf’s initial plan included providing protection against “dishonest practices”—such as the use of inaccurate scales—by “unscrupulous traders” (Davidson 1967: 78). In 1904 the Oloa movement established an alternative copra-marketing company owned by part-Europeans and Samoans in order to emancipate natives from the white traders. The Oloa also opposed Solf’s native policy. Under this new plantation economy, maintaining one’s status as a law-abiding tax-paying citizen required participating in surplus production. Oloa members paid subscriptions called “Lafoga Oloa” (Hempenstall 1978: 44). In Wendt’s novel, the name of Pepe’s close friend, Lafoga, recalls this movement. The German Administration also encouraged a racialized form of contract labor. Solf’s plan for a large-scale government plantation discouraged planters such as Richard Deeken who sought to popularize Samoa as a small-business white-settler paradise. Melanesians and Chinese were contracted to provide indentured labor for European plantations. Toward the end of German control in 1914, there were 877 Melanesians and 2,200 Chinese. Significantly, contract labor in Samoa occurred on a much smaller scale than in Hawai‘i, and the resulting miscegenation laws attempted to produce a sharper division between native and immigrant populations. Unlike in Hawai‘i, intermarriage between natives and non-native laborers was strictly forbidden before 1914 (Meleisea 1987a: 110).7 During World War I, Samoa, New Guinea, and Ponape went undefended, falling immediately to Allied troops. Germany viewed its Pacific possessions chiefly as sources of raw material and outlets for investment capital; Berlin’s priorities lay closer to home in the North Atlantic. The subsequent New Zealand administration immediately attempted to privatize land for surplus cultivation. In 1924, Administrator George Spafford Richardson classified land that had traditionally fallen within the jurisdiction of the fono (village council) as cultivated

Recounting the past, telling new futures 69 land or fallow (unused) land (Meleisea 1987b: 131). This unused village land would be divided into 5-acre parcels for individual use. Under this system, Richardson attempted to abolish the ancient system of matai authority which derived from control over parcels associated with their titles. For various reasons, Richardson’s plan did not fully succeed. But these attempts at land privatization directly challenged Samoan subsistence agriculture and descent group land tenure where basic resources were made available to all through a balance between egalitarianism and hierarchy. British consul Thomas Trood commented on this “communal” system which is the basis for fa‘a Sāmoa: “‘they are expected to divide what they have among their relatives and friends . . . All industry is checked, stifled and turned into ridicule by the pernicious system of communism’” (1912: 3–4). Tauilo mimics the colonizer when he scolds Pepe for giving away the fish he and Toasa caught: “‘The sooner you learn not to give away things you’ve worked hard to get the better! . . . You work for something. You keep it. That’s the new way. That’s the way to get ahead. Why do you think most of the people here are so poor? . . . Because they share everything with thieves and liars and bludgers and lazy people!’” (Wendt 1994: 152). Tauilo decides to send Pepe to a town school and forbids him from seeing Toasa who teaches him “‘nonsense about lions and aitu and sharing everything’” (152). In this way, Tauilo also rejects his own father who not only refused conversion but had no desire for profit. Being “satisfied with what he had,” he remained “ignorantly lazy,” “without vision or education” (13–14). While Meleisea argues that no fundamental change in Samoan land tenure occurred during the colonial period because Samoa continued to maintain a subsistence agricultural economy, Wendt’s novel suggests otherwise. While villages were considered autonomous and ‘āiga (descent groups) were equal regardless of rank, the respect for status, age, and chiefly titles maintained hierarchies. Th is complex system of egalitarianism and prestige when altered by the colonial systems of the church and surplus accumulation exacerbated existing rivalries. Indeed, the pursuit of prestige and status central to fa‘a Sāmoa fuels Tauilo and Malo’s rivalry. Tauilo seeks to have his ‘āiga regain its “true position” as “the leading aiga in Sapepe” (28). To do this, he must overtake Malo, the second highest-ranking matai next to Toasa. But the rivalry goes back many generations before European contact to when the two sons of Tauilo’s namesake, Tauilopepe Mauga, killed their father and one another over succession to the title. The Malo ‘āiga comes to dominate village politics until the next generation defeats them in war. When the missionaries arrive in the 1830s, the Tauilopepe ‘āiga refuse conversion for three generations until Tauilo attends the London Missionary Society’s Theological College to become a pastor. Enamored with wealth, Tauilo sells the school’s crops and returns to the village disgraced. But he continues to seek status through the church and the plantation economy. Church services become a staging ground for prestige when Tauilo “outbids” Malo in the weekly offering. Wendt’s view of Christianity is much more contentious than, for example, the views of Garrett (1982) and Forman (1992) who argue that Christianity was absorbed into the fa‘a Sāmoa.8 For Wendt the indigenization of

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Christianity becomes yet another means for playing out the rivalry for prestige central to Samoan life. Tauilo justifies this matter of ‘āiga pride by reconciling his wealth with Christian charity. Later, he becomes a deacon to redeem himself in the eyes of the villagers who know of his affair with Malo’s wife, Moa. In his first sermon entitled “God, Money, and Success,” Tauilo reconciles the two paths to status (religion and money) by arguing that a man who retains his soul in the pursuit of wealth is an admirable person. Troubled by his own hypocrisy, he blusters on with threats of damnation for those who sell their souls in the pursuit of wealth and power. But his desire for wealth is translated in his daydreams into sexual power over Moa whose body becomes the dead bodies of victims of the influenza epidemic, “all cold and pregnant with death; maggots; and the sweet nauseous stench of rotting flesh” (92). His quest for power via his affair with Moa, then, leads him—as we shall see—back both to the effects of colonial power (the influenza epidemic) and to the cosmogonic origin of Samoan life (the maggots). But, for now, let’s see how his affair with Moa implicates Tauilo in the capitalist economy. In order to “win” at the plantation game, Tauilo exchanges sexual favors for unlimited credit at the store. In this way he “cheats” in his marriage to Lupe, but it is not the kind of cheating Toasa advocates, for Tauilo’s scheme only further involves him in the capitalist economy. By paying Moa through sex, he is able to hire wage laborers to work alongside the men of his ‘āiga and efficiently clear hundreds of acres of bush. Malo also hires his ‘āiga as wage laborers, a “flagrant violation of customary practice” that had “no historical precedent”: “the men of Sapepe, as a group, had never received wages before; only common laborers on government and papalagi-owned plantations worked for wages” (104). In prostituting himself, Tauilo becomes part of this growing system of alienated labor. Moa accuses him of being a “dishonest seller” because he has no desire for Moa herself, whose desire for Tauilo is real (32–33). Moa is also already part of a system of sexual labor. She works as a prostitute prior to marrying Malo who is one of her clients (31). Moa and Lupe both term this system of sexual labor “using,” thus evoking the categories of cultivated (or used) and fallow (unused) land. Moa dismisses Tauilo’s advances with, “‘You’ve used me enough,’” and Lupe admonishes him, “‘Don’t come to me because you want to use me to lose your fears and anger’” (145, 11). Here, Lupe points out how the sexual comfort she provides encourages him to further pursue his desire for status. Lupe’s second son by Tauilo is conceived in such a context of “use,” and Galupo—if we believe his story—is the product of Moa’s liaison with Tauilo. (Significantly, the term “use” should not be equated with Marxist notions of use value; rather, as my analysis shows below, the term refers to cultivated land for the purposes of surplus production.) Galupo is also implicated in the “use” of women: “Some nights . . . he would take the car and see a fi lm or pick up a girl, drive to Mulinuu Point, use her efficiently (that was his description), and never see her again” (361; emphasis in original). He also uses his sister Moli to betray his adopted family (363). In “using” Moli, Galupo violates a central covenant of fa‘a Sāmoa, the feagaiga, a

Recounting the past, telling new futures 71 covenant of respect between a brother and sister that gave special honor to the sister: Brothers consider their eldest sister as the most important member of the family and there is a well established relation between them. Her corner of the house is held sacred. Unbecoming words in her presence are strictly forbidden. If she gets married, the same respect is due to her husband . . . Should the girl be touched with anger at her brother, she is likely to curse him and his children and it is generally believed that her curses will be realised. This is why a young man is very careful how he treats his sister, lest she call evil upon him and his children. (Tala 1987: 165) The feagaiga was enforced by the belief that if a brother made his sister angry the family aitu would cause misfortune to befall him or his children. If a chief were ill, his sister would wash out her mouth with coconut water or pūpū in case she had spoken against him or felt anger toward him (Meleisea 1987a: 37). Galupo’s shocking behavior compromises this covenant, a central aspect of the va-tapuia (Va‘ai 1999: 82). The va and va-tapuia imply the “space between all things” which include the temporal, personal, and mythological (e.g., watery spaces out of which the god Tagaloa created the heavens and the earth) (46). Associated with va-tapuia are the conventions or tapu which guide social interaction and behavior. The term “va” literally means the “[d]istance, space (between two places, things, or people)” and the “[r]elationship, relations (between two things or people)” (Milner 1993: 307). Va implies mutual respect and courtesy that operate not only at a physical and relational level but also as metaphors for negotiating the space between cultures (Va‘ai 1999: 47). Galupo’s and Tauilo’s sexual betrayals signify a more profound betrayal of their relation to land. The relation between land and women is signified in the word fanua or “land,” a term which defi nes [a person’s] relationship to the environment and his/her heritage (Va‘ai 1999: 35). Eleele (the earth) literally means “blood,” and fanua means “placenta.” In Tonga, after birth the umbilical cord or fonua is buried in the earth because for Tongans people are themselves the land (Va‘ai 1999: 36; Mahina 1992: 2). For the indigenous Fijian, vanua is an extension of the self, containing one’s past and future (Va‘ai 1999: 35; Lal 1992: 224). One’s relationship to the fanua requires acknowledging that one belongs to the land which is a source of mana and rootedness (Va‘ai 1999: 36). The “use” relations between men and women in Wendt’s novel reflect the pursuit of status through a masculinist commodification of land under the plantation economy. The first bush-clearing scene reveals this altered relation. Toasa ironically exhorts the workers to “deflower” the land: “‘You scared of her? . . . She won’t scream and charge you in court with rape! . . . Come on now, raise your babysized manhoods and chop, cut, burn!’ The line [of workers] advanced; the axes and bushknives started biting into the flesh of the living wall” (61). Though

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Toasa’s language here is mocking, ironic—he is against surplus cultivation—the scene exhibits a problematic aspect of Wendt’s novel. In its eagerness to critique the effects of the surplus economy, the novel’s mythological approach compares women and reproduction with the land and productivity. Both the novel’s allegory and the comparisons within indigenous culture require that the deleterious effects of colonization be inscribed on the bodies of these doomed women, transforming female characters into metaphors for land. Meanwhile, male characters are allowed to reference human actors in history. The abstraction of women as metaphors enacts a violence which does not apply to the men. Characters such as Lupe, Fanua, and Moa are thus destroyed by men who have betrayed the fa‘a Sāmoa, while characters such as Susanna help to destroy the men who struggle to revive it. However, Lupe and Moa are significant for their explicit critique of the men who have betrayed them, for these women actually voice the critique of the plantation system and object to Tauilo’s use of them, and by extension, the land. And here is where a central problem arises in the close connection within native culture between women and land —one that Hulme’s The Bone People critiques more explicitly. Certainly Wendt’s novel points to the ways in which gendered narratives within indigenous culture become exacerbated under colonial rule. But let’s first see how male characters reference orators and colonial administrators as “agents” of history.

Colonial infantilization of orators Samoan form and ceremonies, and especially Samoan speeches, are often quoted as marks of high civilisation, but they really exhibit only what would be expected from grown up children. Stephen Shepherd Allen, New Zealand administrator 9

Toasa’s only hope of altering the troubling relation to the land is to cheat—to play the card hidden in his lāvalava. Pepe is that card. Amid Tauilo’s drive toward profit, Toasa nurtures Pepe in traditional tasks such as fishing and genealogical recitation: “My name is Pepe Tauilopepe, Descendant of the House of Sapepe, Heir to the Estate of the Dead, future Protector of the Living, Guardian of the Unborn . . . Be a leader, strong and merciful. Be a man, just and . . . fair . . . That the Dead of Sapepe are with us, and we, the Living, are with the Dead and the yet unborn, forever and inseparable. Our duty is to uphold what the Dead bequeathed to us to guard and bequeath to the Unborn when we too join the Dead.” (72–73) Pepe’s training makes him aware of Tauilo’s destructiveness, how the “wage battle” with Malo leads to Toasa’s beating and how Tauilo’s quest for status causes Lupe to lose her second son in childbirth. The death of this child eventu-

Recounting the past, telling new futures 73 ally leads to Lupe’s metaphorical “death.” She becomes someone who “with head bowed follow[s] her shadow into the kitchen fale” (153). The deaths of Toasa and Lupe—and Pepe’s own impending death—prompt the transition from overt resistance to history, from oral to literate, recorded in Pepe’s novel, Book Two of Leaves. Pepe’s penchant for the oral tradition ranges from his admiration of the sly clown and loafer, Taifau, to the use of jokes to subvert the colonial authority of his teacher, Mrs. Brown. Later, when Pepe testifies in court, he affirms what the colonizer deems a blasphemous joke: his descent from the mythical Pepesa. When the judge asks him why he is the “son of the gods,” Pepe counters, “‘Because it is my genealogy!’ I am feeling relaxed and want to tell It everything because it is taking my joke seriously” (200). Pepe insists that despite the missionaries the old ways are not dead, that the gods still reside in the bush and mountains. Risking being labeled a pagan, he maintains the origin of all life, pō: “‘I have the darkness and myself’” and therefore “‘I am my God’” (201–2). Pepe’s affirmation of genealogy indicates not only his loyalty to Toasa’s “paganism,” but also how genealogy is the object of what I call “colonial pejoration.” That is, from the official colonial viewpoint, genealogy and the oral tradition are “jokes.” In a mode of parody associated with magic realism Pepe reveals an “identification with the oral expression of popular cultures in the Third World” (Saldívar 1995: 182). His invocation of the collectivity that grounds genealogy is the collective voice of magic realism that inverts, in a jesting manner, the values of the official culture (182). The name “Pepe” also evokes the character’s own status as orator, as it indicates the corners of the fale reserved for lesser chiefs and orators.10 This is in keeping with Pepe’s status since he never actually assumes the senior tu‘ua title. The name “Pepesa” also means “sacred child,” a diminution of the heroic ancestor. The novel’s representation of oral tradition parodies the German administration’s attempts to delegitimate orators (tulāfale) in Samoan society through a politics of pejoration and infantilization. In pre-European times, political power in Samoa centered on four chiefly titles and the influence of two groups of orator chiefs, Tūmua and Pule. These groups manipulated elections for important chiefly titles, acted as spokespersons and executors to titular rulers and maintained genealogy and tradition. As such, they were considered “Samoa’s real national power” (Field 1984: 22). Authority, however, was not autocratic but emphasized authority dispersed between fono (village council), ali‘i (chiefs),11 and tulāfale (orators). The relative influence of chiefs and orators differed from village to village and depended upon genealogical structure, time, circumstance, and personality. Though ultimate authority resided with the ali‘i, the tulāfale balanced their power by acting as “executive agents” who made formal speeches on behalf of a chief whose title he, as orator, was connected to, and participating in the ceremonial distribution of land (Davidson 1967: 19). The practice of informal consultation and debate prevented the creation of an autocratic system. When Solf became Governor of the German Protectorate of Samoa in 1900, he disguised his plan to gradually chip away at traditional authority and beliefs.

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Solf wrote to the Colonial Office, “‘The further aim of the Government . . . will be to find ways and means to render ineffectual as a political factor, and slowly to do away with the institution of the Tumua and Pule’” (Davidson 1967: 80). Overt resistance to Solf’s plan emerged in 1908. The Mau a Pule (Opinion of Pule) movement, led by the orator Lauaki Namulau‘ulu Mamoe, objected to the loss of matai powers, the imprisonment of Samoans, and the silencing of native voices in government. It also sought to establish a British protectorate over Samoa (Meleisea 1987a: 113, 118–19). When its leaders requested U.S. aid from American Samoa, they were exiled for treason to Saipan in the Marianas (also then a German colony). Lauaki and his fellow exiles served an indeterminate term of hard labor while procuring a meager living from the land and sea. Lauaki lost his brother, Namulau‘ulu Pulali, within the first year. When the colonial administration finally allowed them to return in late 1915, Lauaki was not among them. He had died of dysentery on the voyage home. By 1919 none of the exiled chiefs were alive, having died after their return or in the 1918 influenza epidemic (Hempenstall 1978: 71–72). The Mau a Pule resonates in Pepe’s attempts to uphold the old traditions in the face of Tauilo’s “progress.” In both cases, resistance is criminalized. Lauaki is publicly exiled, serves in a labor corvée, and dies; Pepe is tried in court and banished, serves four years’ hard labor, and dies of turberculosis. Just as Solf has criminalized orators who resist their own disempowerment, so Pepe and his friends are criminalized by the law and his family who call them the “worst sinners and criminals in Samoa” (216). The novel opens up this history of resistance through naming and its use of the Samoan language. The story of Lauaki and the exiles resonates with Pepe’s alternative community in the Vaipe composed of the “great story-teller” Tagata and the ex-wrestler Lafoga, whose name refers not only to the Oloa but also to the tradition of oratory. “Lafolafoga” literally means “the speech of an orator” and the “[d]elivery, articulation” of speech. The word “ felafolafoa” means to “debate” or “discuss” (Milner 1993: 94). Pepe’s “three-man family” congregates around Lafoga’s wife, Fanua, who is compared to the land: “Like Toasa was the heart of Sapepe, Fanua has become . . . the heart of the Vaipe, the woman who gave birth to us in the beginning” (219, 224). Deliberately invoking the goddess Papa, the earth, Fanua brings peace and healing, and makes them “feel whole again” (221). Historically, Lauaki’s exile precipitated further attempts to undermine the authority of orators by altering the fa‘alupega or national ceremonial address. In 1912 Schultz replaced the traditional fa‘alupega honoring Tūmua and Pule, the districts and paramount families, with one honouring “his Majesty the Kaiser, the most dignified King of our Imperial Government” (Meleisea 1987a: 114).12

Recounting the past, telling new futures 75 Old Fa‘alupega Samoan

Translation

1 2 3 4 5

1 2 3 4 5

Tulouna a Tūmua ma Pule Tulouna a Itū‘au ma Alātaua Tulouna a ‘Āiga i le Tai ma le Va‘a o Fonotī Tulouna Tama ma o latou ‘āiga po‘o ‘āiga ma a latou tama

Respect to Tūmua and Pule Respect to Itū‘au and Alātaua Respect to ‘Āiga i le Tai and the crew of Fonotī Respect to the sons and their families or to the families and their sons.13

New Fa‘alupega Samoan 1 2 3 4 5

Tulouna a Lana Maiesitete le Kaisa, o le tupu mamalu o lo tatou Mālō Kaisalika aoao. Tulouna a Lana Afioga le Kovana Kaisalika o le sui o le Kaisa i Sāmoa nei. Sūsū mai Mālietoa. Afio mai Tupua, ua fa‘amanatuina ai ‘āiga e lua; i lo oulua tofiga Kaisalika o le Fautua. Tulouna a le vasega o Faipule Kaisalika o e lagolago malosi i le Mālō. Afifio mai le nofo a vasega o tofiga Kaisalika o e ua fita i le tautua i le Mālō.

Translation 1 2 3 4 5

Respect to his Majesty the Kaiser, the most dignified King of our Imperial Government. Respect to his honour the Imperial Governor, the Kaiser’s representative in Sāmoa. Welcome to Mālietoa and Tupua, who represent the two families in your positions as advisers to the Imperial government. Respect to the Faipule Kaisalika who are strong supporters of the government. Welcome to the various officials who have served the Imperial government faithfully.14

Lupe’s name registers this assault on the traditional fa‘alupega. Though her name literally refers to “pigeons and doves,” it evokes “ fa‘alupe,” to “[h]ave the title of, be known as” and “ fa‘alupega,” the actual recitation of honors (Milner 1993: 115–16). Her name and her demise—like Lafoga’s—is yet another critique of Tauilo’s embrace of colonial power. While Solf tried to appropriate the power of orator chiefs, Tauilo appropriates chiefly titles. Tauilo denies Toasa’s bequest that Pepe succeed him as tu‘ua. Toasa’s title is never fi lled officially. In practice, Tauilo becomes the head of Toasa’s ‘āiga:

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Recounting the past, telling new futures Many people believed that Tauilopepe wanted to assume the Toasa title but he had not done so. When Toasa died his aiga had turned against Tauilopepe at first, but after he had given them money and whatever else they needed for many years he won their support and became in practice the head matai of the Aiga Toasa. Consequently at council meetings he occupied whichever of the two posts he preferred. No one dared to occupy the vacant one. (319)

Furthermore, the fono meetings become westernized, doing away at times with the principle of unanimity of consent (319–20). In a passage that reveals the competing authorities in the village, Pepe denounces Tauilo and those who have denied him succession: “‘Sapape! . . . It is me, Pepesa. What is mine, bequeathed to me by Toasa, my father, I now bequeath to the dogs! . . . The man who calls himself my father sits like a dog in my place . . . I bequeath you all to him because he is a dog, and you deserve each other!’” (205–6; my italics). The next day, Tauilo beats Pepe for his disobedience; Pepe refuses to fight back, following Toasa’s reminder that in “the sacred way” one must never hit one’s father (206). The two fathers, Toasa (“my father”) and Tauilo (“the man who calls himself my father”), refer to the competing sources of authority during the colonial period, the traditional chiefly structure and the capitalist-inflected colonial one. These systems exacerbate village rivalries. For example, Tauilo’s assertion of himself as father resonates with the infantilizing colonial view that natives were children. Rod Edmond notes that British texts frequently represented Britain as the mother country whose children would eventually “grow up.” The vagueness of this metaphor made the gaining of independence a cloudy issue as it left ambiguous how maturity would be defined as well as the subsequent nature of the parent–child relationship. As the colony comes of age, the gendered metaphor shifts. The colonizing country now is no longer the nurturing mother but the paternal, business-minded father (1997: 134). This familial narrative takes on a particularly damaging form in the Pacific where the description of Polynesians as “childlike” was a popular European perception almost from the beginning of western contact. In Samoa, this system of representation worked in concert with gendered narratives within Samoan culture, namely the custom of referring to an authority figure as “tamā” or “father.” Administrators mistook this show of respect for acceptance of a paternalistic relationship (Davidson 1967: 82). Samoan officials addressed their conciliatory letters to Solf using the term “tamā” and “plead[ed] forgiveness,” beseeching him to clarify their roles in the administration (Meleisea 1987b: 54). Solf took seriously his role as father when he signed a letter to the Lands and Titles Commissioners with the closing, “‘O a‘u o lo outou tamā moni’” or “I am your true father” (Meleisea 1987b: 241, ff. 9). Colonial authority is revealed in the gesture of patriarchal self-appellation. But Tauilo does not merely allegorically represent Solf. Rather, the male-centered notions of authority in Samoan culture found further claim through colonial paternalism. Through these historical resonances, Wendt shows how some aspects of Samoan culture have incorporated aspects of colonial culture, setting

Recounting the past, telling new futures 77 up within Samoan culture the very colonial oppositions of which it sought to rid itself. Solf articulated an infantilizing attitude toward “natives” in an article entitled “Samoa” in which he claimed that Samoans were wayward children: “the natives are ignorant, they have to be instructed; they are lazy and have to learn to work; they are dirty and have to be washed; they are sick with all manner of disease, they must be healed; the natives are savage, cruel and superstitious, they must be soothed and illuminated: they are all big children in need of education and loving guidance” (quoted in Meleisea 1987b: 3; my italics). In A Footnote to History: Eighty Years of Trouble in Samoa15 Robert Louis Stevenson describes the civil war that led to the 1899 Treaty of Berlin that established Samoa as a condominium controlled by Britain, the U.S., and Germany. There, he employs the metaphor of the child to describe how capitalism created stark differences between Samoans and pālagi: Like a child, his true analogue, [the Samoan] observes, apprehends, misapprehends, and is usually silent. As in a child, a considerable intemperance of speech is accompanied by some power of secrecy . . . He looks on at the rude career of the dollar hunt, and wonders. He sees these men rolling in a luxury beyond the ambition of native kings . . . He is strongly conscious of his own position as the common milk-cow; and what is he to do? (1925: 157–58) Stevenson discusses DHPG’s one-sided profits, concluding: “But the true center of the trouble, the head of the boil of which Samoa languishes, is the German firm” (158). The powerlessness of Samoans—what the colonial administration insists is due to their childlike qualities—Stevenson reveals to be a result of gross inequalities under the plantation system. Some years later, Commodore Geoffrey Blake would compare the Mau to “a sulky and insubordinate child who has deliberately disobeyed his father” and would not submit to “peaceful persuasion”: “There is no alternative, therefore, but to treat him roughly . . . force is the only thing which will appeal to the Sāmoan” (Meleisea 1987a: 138). This image reflects Tauilo’s relation to Pepe whom he physically beats for disobeying him. The strategy of infantilization echoes how the islands themselves are viewed. Handbook of Western Samoa (1925) explains how the late-nineteenth-century European rush to control the region,16 the “Pacific strategy,” has transformed “these minute specks on the ocean, of no conceivable value”: “From such premises the Samoan could deduce no other conclusion than that his country was of immense value—the coveted prize of all the Powers—and it need excite little wonder if at times he appears to exaggerate his status as owner of such a treasure to-day” (10; my italics). Epeli Hau‘ofa points out how “derogatory and belittling” images were used to reinforce colonial ethnic stratifications which continue to affect how people see themselves (1994: 149). He advocates envisioning the Pacific Islands as part of “Oceania,” a concept which includes the ocean surrounding the islands themselves, for the world prior to colonization

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“was anything but tiny”: “Smallness is a state of mind” (152). Hau‘ofa’s parody of development in the islands is analogous to Toasa and Pepe’s view of the world. Tauilo’s self-designation as Pepe’s father—through the inscription of his authority on Pepe’s beaten body—then recalls Solf’s own insistence on being called “tamā moni” (true father) and its infantilizing effects (205). This marking of paternal authority on the body can be seen in Tauilo’s beatings of Pepe and his sisters which result in breaks with traditional practice. Pepe’s inability to protect his sisters according to the feagaiga covenant ultimately leads to the dissolution of the family and his rebellion (177–78, 181–82). But Tauilo’s discipline also mimics the headmaster’s beating of Pepe, which itself mirrors the plantation practice of beating indentured laborers (184).17 Tauilo’s mimicry of New Zealand authority is revealed when Peddle praises Tauilo as “‘the new Samoan who is going to help your [Pepe’s] race achieve a better way of life . . . [I]f you want to stand with the modern people like us you have to work hard like your father’” (183). Peddle tries to convince Pepe that Samoans are lazy, happy, and “easy-go-lucky” people who cannot tolerate drink without becoming violent. This connection between “governing” oneself while drinking further illustrates the infantilization of Samoans, their being judged by pālagi as unable to govern themselves. Colonial laws governing alcohol consumption demarcated racial difference between Natives and Europeans. Under the German Administration, only Europeans were allowed to consume alcohol—hence the production of fa‘amafu or home-brewed beer (Meleisea 1987b: 162). The drinking of alcohol also was prohibited by the New Zealand Administration unless one was both European and in possession of a permit (176).18 Pepe serves drinks to wealthy elites, but his father forbids him from drinking. Tauilo threatens to beat Lupe herself when she insinuates that his affair with Moa has caused his lack of concern about their infant son’s death: “He was on his feet, ready to rush at her. In Sapepe, quarrels between married couples usually ended with the husband reasserting his authority through the use of his fists . . . A husband who allowed his wife to dissect him with ridicule without beating her was not considered a good husband by Sapepeans” (151). While this passage suggests that beating is an aspect of Samoan culture, Tauilo’s special brand of violence is located historically in the colonial culture. Tauilo does not beat Lupe precisely because her insinuations and accusations are all too true; they point to Tauilo’s failure of her, a result of pursuing prestige by “using” women and the land. Instead of aiding her in her difficult labor, Tauilo continues to work on the plantation. Returning at dusk to find that she has struggled in childbirth for an entire day, Tauilo is forced to beg Malo for the use of his truck to drive her to the hospital in Apia. Toasa urges him to do what he must, to give Malo anything, even Tauilo’s plantation, in order to save Lupe’s life. The reluctant husband returns unsuccessful, refusing to ingratiate himself. The baby dies, but Lupe lives. Lupe’s near-death recalls an actual event which caused many Samoans to doubt the Administration’s ability to govern. In 1924 Governor Richardson went on an elaborately scheduled tour (malaga) of the islands that included a stop at

Recounting the past, telling new futures 79 Fa‘a‘ai on the southern coast of Savai‘i. When a group of villagers from Foalalo reported the critical condition of a woman who had been in labor for five days, Richardson, not wanting to upset his precise timetable, forbade the doctor from rendering aid (Field 1984: 65). Faumuinā Fiame Mulinu‘u19 urged Ritchie, the doctor, to provide medical care. Ritchie refused, telling Faumuinā to send the woman to a nurse at the government hospital at Tuasivi, 56 kilometers away. Faumuinā advised Ritchie that everyone knew “‘such a thing was impossible . . . as the woman would die before reaching Tuasivi’” (65). Ritchie suggested taking her to Apia, even further away. The woman died without medical help and without delivering her child. This incident was re-told many times and had a deep effect on many Samoans (65). It was just one among many that led people to support the Mau. It also highlights Tauilo’s similarity to a coldhearted, unfeeling administration and explains how the loss of Lupe’s child—in conjunction with Tauilo’s “disciplining” of his daughters and son—leads Pepe to rebel. Pepe’s two fathers, Toasa and Tauilo, then, represent the competing forms of authority during the colonial period—matai authority constituted by orator chiefs, on the one hand, and the colonial administration attempting to appropriate this power, on the other. Significantly, though Tauilo aspires to be a pālagi, he remains undeniably Samoan. As his experience at the club indicates, the pālagi elite tolerate his presence, finding him a drunken buffoon whose wealth alone licenses him to drink. Tauilo’s mimicry of the colonizers suggests divisions within Samoan society, how some Native elites consented to colonial rule and internalized European values. These attitudes became part of the pursuit of status in Samoan culture and suggest the entangled nature of colonial and postcolonial identities. Even Pepe and Toasa’s attempted refusal of the colonial system is, willy-nilly, a response to it; thus, the postcolonial period brought about by the Mau must nevertheless be seen in relation to this historical period and its legacy. Tauilo’s emulation of colonial elites and his infantilization of Pepe suggest how colonial power narcissistically demands that the colonized reflect metonymically its own image. Just as Solf desired a German-centered fa‘alupega, so Tauilo desires that his son mirror his own image (not Toasa’s), and that Lupe’s body bear a sign of Tauilo’s power. The lava fields, however, refuse to reflect the colonial desire for productive land and the delegitimation of tradition. Early resistances by the Mau a Pule coincided with volcanic eruptions on Matāvanu on Savai‘i between 1905 and 1910. These flows produced 40 square miles of lava fields with depths varying between 10 and 400 feet (Meleisea 1987a: 121). Meleisea describes the event: The boiling lava flowing into the sea caused clouds of steam which, together with smoke and ash from the volcano, could be seen for miles. When the volcano first exploded, people from all over Savai‘i . . . were very much afraid, and many believed it to be God punishing them. Sulphur fumes and volcanic ash destroyed crops and contaminated water and thus caused famine in the villages that had escaped being covered by lava flows. In Sale‘aula, the village was rebuilt by 1907 but salt deposits from the evaporating sea water

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Recounting the past, telling new futures (heated by the lava flow) had damaged crops, and the sulphurous gas from the lava made people ill. (Meleisea 1987a: 121)

The village Sale‘aula, incidentally, is associated with Pule. The eruptions there coincided with other “eruptions”—orator resistance to the Administration. But beyond the temporal linkage, the lava fields are resistant since they deny the liberal logic of land as productive property. Tagata, the great storyteller, describes them as “‘where the peace lies, where all the dirty little places and lies and monuments we make to ourselves mean nothing, because lava can be nothing else but lava . . . The lava spreads for miles right into the sea. Nothing else. Just black silence, like the moon maybe’” (207). While critics have argued that lava signifies an existentialist nothingness (Subramani 1992: 121), lava also refuses commutation: “lava can be nothing else but lava.” Not easily converted into cultivable land, lava cannot be “used.” That is, it does not receive its value by commutation into agricultural land and then into profit. “‘Lava is the only true thing left,’” Tagata says, because it “‘cannot change’” (225). Evoking the earth, Papa, found in many parts of Polynesia,20 Tagata describes lava as the “‘rock from whom we came’” that is “‘with us at the back of our souls’” (225). In his suicide letter or “Last Will and Testament,” Tagata compares himself to the demi-god Maui who is ground to dust by Hine-nui-te-po (Hina of the Night) whose “‘channel is all lava’” (226). Pō (night or darkness) is the source of all life in Polynesian cosmogonies, the source out of which the sky father and earth mother come, what Toasa calls the “Void” (73). Tagata’s final message, then, is both hopeful and disillusioned: while the lava field remains untouched by the capitalist economy,21 it nevertheless is a place where one cannot remain because, as he notes, “‘[Y]ou will die of thirst and hunger . . . There is no water, no food, just lava. All is lava’” (208). The absurd contradiction of colonialism is that it allows for no “outside” to either surplus production or resistance—neither of which is a tenable or sustainable social condition. Hence Tagata’s suicide. Rather than suggesting that the eruption was God’s punishment against the Mau a Pule, then, Wendt reinterprets the event, drawing the connection between the orator’s refusal of the plantation economy and lava’s refusal as arable land. If the lava fields memorialize resistance to the plantation economy, the bush is another place of memory.

O le Mau: exile, imprisonment, and dis-ease While Tauilo’s men raze the bush, Toasa tells a story of his boyhood adventure into this now-vanishing terrain. There high atop the ridge, he and Tauilo’s father found a rock platform and two old conch shells. The boys refer to these as “lions and aitu” associated with “important memories” (66). To what memories does Toasa refer? During the civil wars in the late 1880s, anti-German Samoan forces fled into the bush to avoid capture. Stevenson called this space their “fugitive sovereign” (1925: 183). Laupepa, the then true tupu (king), hid in the bush to the dismay of German sailors who attempted to surround him under cloud of night

Recounting the past, telling new futures 81 only to discover that he was nowhere to be found, having “wandered further, over the woody mountains, the backbone of the land” (185). There in the forest he built himself a small town while day after day the German blue-jackets beat the forests for the fugitive only to return to Apia exhausted and disappointed. In 1899, after the Treaty of Berlin established Western Samoa as a German Protectorate, the government appointed a boy-king, Malietoa Tanumafili, and refused to recognize the popularly elected Matā‘afa Iosefa. When supporters of Matā‘afa rose up in anger, U.S. and British warships shelled coastal villages. Matā‘afa describes his escape: So my people and I left Mulinu‘u and we went into the bush. Then the great guns of the American warships and the British warships shelled the town of Apia and the mountain of Vaea, and sent armed men ashore to hold the town . . . [T]he British warships proceeded up and down the coasts of Upolu and Savai‘i, shelling many towns and villages, none of which could defend themselves . . . being nearly all old men, women, children, and pastors. These were compelled to seek refuge in the bush . . . (quoted in Meleisea 1987a: 103–4, italics in original) But life in the bush was not without its dangers. Those who escaped from their destroyed villages lived in unhealthy huts and subsisted on unsuitable food, resulting in illness and death (Meleisea 1987a: 104). Here, we see the connection between exile and illness apparent in Lauaki’s exile and Pepe’s banishment in the Vaipe. A similar retreat into the bush frustrated the New Zealand military 30 years later during the Mau rebellion. But before we turn to this, we must understand how the Mau came to be. After martial law ended, New Zealand assumed official control in 1921. Almost immediately, the Administration passed the Samoan Offenders Ordinance which abrogated a village fono’s customary rights to banish law-breakers. The power to banish had been one of the strongest sanctions of customary law exercised by group consensus. Traditionally it was seen as an ultimate punishment—short of death—and was reserved for offences deemed intolerable by the village (Meleisea 1987b: 132). If a matai were banished, his entire ‘āiga went with him, seeking refuge in a village where other relatives resided. They lost all status and rights to land either temporarily or permanently.22 The Samoan Offenders Ordinance allowed the Administrator to appropriate the collective authority of the village council in an “arbitrary and dictatorial” manner (Field 1984: 59). When Tauilo almost singlehandedly banishes Malo from the village, he also breaks with customary practice. Tauilo’s banishment of Pepe and depriving him of succession are emblematic of the Administrator’s dictatorial authority as a result of the Ordinance. In the early 1920s, six years prior to overt action by the Mau, 53 matai suffered banishment and loss of their titles for refusing to support colonial policies (Meleisea 1987a: 133). In 1924—the same year the woman died in childbirth— Richardson banished and imprisoned Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III (Davidson

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1967: 125; Field 1984: 64). Two years later, Mau leaders Faumuinā and Afamasaga were banished for peaceful non-cooperation (Meleisea 1987a: 135). Resenting Christian doctrine, the money economy, and delegitimation of orators, the Mau implemented its plan for passive resistance: government committees and councils refused to meet; villages ignored visits by government officials; people boycotted courts of law; children were removed from public schools; copra went unharvested; workers abandoned government agricultural projects; public health regulations were ignored; births and deaths went unregistered; white-owned stores were boycotted; and monies for poll and medical taxes were donated instead to the Mau (Davidson 1967: 127–28; Field 1984: 98; Meleisea 1987a: 135). While the number of people punished for associating with the Mau mounted, the organization, led by O. F. Nelson, a wealthy part-Samoan merchant, planter, and matai, submitted to the New Zealand Parliament a petition signed by 145 matai requesting that the government address 21 specific grievances. New Zealand vindicated Richardson’s claim that the Mau was backed by local European agitators (Meleisea 1987b: 144). That year, O. F. Nelson and two other Mau leaders, A. G. Smyth and Edwin W. Gurr, were exiled to New Zealand where they continued to advocate for Samoan independence. In exile, Nelson publicized Samoa’s plight in the pamphlet The Truth about Samoa. The Mau protested the colonial presence in a petition, signed by 8,000 out of 9,300 Samoan men, sent to the League of Nations (Meleisea 1987a: 136). On December 28, 1929, a day known as “Black Saturday,” a peaceful procession gathered to welcome back exiles Smyth and Gurr. Prior to the procession, a military policeman died in the course of a fight with Samoan youths. Later, when the police tried to arrest the Secretary of the Mau, Māta‘utia Karauna, a scuffle ensued. Police opened fire with machine guns on the procession and killed 11 Samoans, including the highest-ranking chiefs in the Mau, Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, Tuimaleali‘ifano, and Faumuinā. They had been attempting to re-establish peace and order when they were shot (Meleisea 1987a: 137; Davidson 1967: 138). The Coroner’s Court expunged Administration responsibility, claiming that no deaths were caused by machine gun fire: police had merely fired over the heads of the members to prevent their advance toward the police station. On Black Saturday, Mau members fled into the bush, the customary place of refuge during war. During January through March of 1930, the New Zealand military mounted a campaign of terror against the Mau. Fellow villagers, composed mostly of the elderly, women, and children, secretly supplied Mau members with food and information about troop movements. The military were unable to obtain reliable information about the whereabouts of the Mau who never remained in a single camp for long. Rough terrain, wet weather, and the dense foliage of the bush frustrated the Navy. A seaplane used to spy on Mau movements was claimed by the bush when humidity and heavy rains caused the engine to malfunction (Field 1984: 170–74). Toasa’s story of lions and aitu recalls these memories of resistance, the significance of the bush and mountain ridges as places of refuge in wartime. His tale presents, in the highly metaphorical oral mode of magic realism, the story of

Recounting the past, telling new futures 83 these resistances. The “lions” are the conch shells, the voices of the gods, but they are also the “human breath that would bring them back to life” (68–69). As Pepe rehearses his genealogy, Toasa refers to him as a lion (71), thus connecting orators to ancestors (aitu), resistance, and memorialization. The Mau represented a reassertion of Tūmua and Pule who influenced the Mau in the same manner as their predecessors (Davidson 1967: 133). When O. F. Nelson was exiled, orators from Palauli, one of the centers of Pule, urged Samoans to pilfer European property. Guarded by armed Mau, orators feasted and sang anti-government songs in the shadow of the Administrator’s office (Davidson 1967: 130). Here, we can see a striking similarity to Pepe’s and Tagata’s large-scale “pilfering” from Tauilo’s store and their fa‘amafu parties. The Mau was different from other anticolonial nationalist movements which modeled themselves on European-based government and “progressive” change. It asserted the superiority of a highly decentralized Samoan system of government, retaining the traditional order and the belief that this system could accommodate any changes Samoans desired. Only through fa‘a Sāmoa could “dignified autonomy” be maintained (Meleisea 1987b: 154). Pepe’s memorialization of the Mau in the story of “lions and aitu” and in his orally-inflected “novel” suggests the “occult” prominence of oral tradition in anti-colonial nationalism. Frantz Fanon explains: “The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke . . . The method of allusion is more and more widely used” (Fanon 1963: 241). Pepe’s narrative alludes to these moments of resistance memorialized in stories. The postcolonial nationalist future, Galupo himself, emerges literally out of this oral testimony, inheriting the storytelling skills which are described as “sweet coconut milk”: “He let the tingling bubble up from the earth into his toes and up into his belly. Then, like sweet coconut milk, it surged up his chest and throat and out of his mouth. And he laughed for the power and the glory was his. Now” (413). But the relation between the story of lions and aitu and the Mau’s retreat into the bush is perhaps not so obvious precisely because it is presented in highly metaphorical terms. Toasa’s fantastic and secret symbolism of the lions evokes the mystical or the “occult” qualities of the Mau during the period of government suppression. F. M. Keesing argued in 1934, during the period of government suppression, that the Mau had assumed the more “mystical form” of other organizations “forcibly thwarted” (178). Comparing the Mau to the Maori wars and prophet movements, he pointed out that they “emerged rapidly into more or less violent action, and once suppressed became intraverted as a stubborn uncompromising mysticism and conservatism which passing decades hardly mellowed”: “Much the same frustration and mysticism is found among Mau supporters and communities to-day [in 1934], and explains at least in some measure why such a remarkably united front continues to be shown” (188–89). Tauilo’s deliberate rejection of Toasa’s story as a sign of senility suggests his own rejection of the Mau and its legacy, independence. Tauilo, as we discover

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later, does not support self-determination but rather believes that Samoa cannot survive without New Zealand oversight. His clearing of the bush not only extends the influence of the plantation economy, but also limits the bush, the sacred abode of aitu such as the owl and the sanctuary for resistance itself. However, Tauilo is unable to completely suppress resistance. The magnificent banyan tree in the clearing reminds him of his lack of complete control. The banyan tree, after all, is where Faitoaga and Pepe witness Tauilo’s bouts of paranoia. The tree is also a metaphor for the Mau itself, a trope developed by the historian Keesing who compared it to a tree whose origins are in “the Polynesian past”: “Its trunk and branches [lie] in the history of Samoan–white interaction—fed by the potent sap of cultural conflict and change, pruned by the political knife of the German authorities, forced by the strong fertilizer of democratic sentiment. The atmosphere of heat generated partly by New Zealand’s enthusiastic schemes, partly through friction between the mandatory and the European community, merely brought it to sudden flower and fruit” (1934: 177; my italics). The novel takes up the extended historical metaphor of the “political knife” in the figure of Tauilo who, like the German government, attempts to destroy the banyan and also the vestiges of the Mau (Toasa and Pepe). The democratic impulse which “fertilized” the Mau is presented in Tagata who describes his dead body as “excellent manure” (227). The title of the novel, which also refers to Tauilo’s plantation, evokes this historical conflict between Samoans and European colonizers that led to the flowering of the Mau movement. The book itself records this history of resistance metaphorically in its own “leaves.” But Keesing also argues that the Mau was “essentially a manifestation of a cultural-pathological condition in Samoan life” which resulted from long periods of “repression, psychological stress” and “social disintegration,” aggravated by “sudden official pressure” (1934: 177). Wendt’s thesis in history makes only a slight alteration to Keesing, arguing that though most of these conditions contributed to the emergence of the Mau, social disintegration itself had not occurred: “The Mau was, in itself, substantial proof that Old Samoa had weathered the century-old storm of European contact” (1965: 117). What, then, is the status of history in Wendt’s novel? Does the novel mirror his thesis? Is it a purely fictionalized representation without historical reference? Or, is it a way to voice what his thesis did not allow him? Here, the difference between Keesing’s account of the Mau and Wendt’s has to do with their own historical vantage points. Keesing’s view of the Mau as mystical and occult—similar to Toasa’s perspective—has to do with the period in which Keesing wrote, when the future of the movement was still uncertain. At this point in time, 1933, O. F. Nelson had just returned from exile in New Zealand. Keesing writes: “at the time of writing it is not clear whether he will submit to the government or resume political activities or so perhaps be deported again” (1934: 187). Nor is it clear whether or not the Mau is crushed or only in hiding since the “chain of events is not complete” (187). But the history of the Mau is still not complete even from Wendt’s vantage point, witnessing its fruition in Samoan independence. After all, individuals make different claims to the Mau. Wendt’s thesis struggled with the problem

Recounting the past, telling new futures 85 of objectivity, specifically the way history can only be told from one’s own perspective: “what we think about the past of Samoa (and its future) is determined by what we are. So why talk about being objective? . . . We have recreated the past of Samoa in our own peculiar way” (113). The final chapter of Wendt’s thesis refuses to sell an “original” interpretation of the Mau and even critiques the academic consumption of new readings. Leaves records the very contradictions that his thesis perhaps could not explore, the way in which the Mau, for all its outward unity, foregrounded the complexities and divisions within Samoan society. The question Wendt ultimately asks is, “What does one do with the history of the Mau? What interpretive maneuvers become necessary when viewing this past from one’s own temporal and historical location, after independence?” Though the Mau in 1965 was a victorious sign of the persistence of fa‘a Sāmoa, it also was initially a site of criminalization. Wendt’s short story “Pint-size Devil on a Thoroughbred” explores the connection between the Mau and criminality. In “Pint-size Devil” the narrator’s grandfather is an “outlaw member of an outlawed independence movement” who—after independence—becomes “a respectable political outlaw” (1999: 51). While Grandfather specializes in “political subversion,” Pili, his illegitimate adopted son, focuses on everyday subversions of the law: all forms of theft, graduating from stealing the neighbour’s prize boar, giving cheek to the cops, conning unsuspecting children of their picture money and running a protection racket for all the youths of his age in the neighbourhood to burgling stores, houses and people that invited burgling. Grandfather found himself periodically in jail or detention camp or hiding in the bush because of his political activities; Pili began finding himself in jail, period. (51) Pili’s “heroism,” the narrator suggests, should be seen in genealogical relation to the Mau. Pepe’s actions also link him to the Mau. Like Nelson, Gurr, Smyth, and Faumuinā, he is banished and imprisoned for opposing his father or “tamā.” In 1928, 400 people were sentenced to prison for donning Mau uniforms and raising funds. Hundreds of other members presented themselves to be arrested but were refused, as the government had no space for them in the prisons. Richardson offered the arrested members pardons if they would place their complaints before him. They refused, preferring to be dealt with by the court. Once in court, they refrained from pleading and thereby rejected the court’s jurisdiction (Davidson 1967: 132). Like the 400 Mau members, Pepe asks to be tried in court rather than settle it as a family matter (194), and there he flouts the Christian-based justice system by asserting himself as the descendant of another god, Pepesa. And, like the Mau members, Pepe is convicted in court and sentenced to a jail term. Richardson’s paternalism, his remitting their sentences as an act of clemency, mirrors Tauilo’s claim that he mitigated Pepe’s prison sentence (203). Pepe’s narrative in Book Two also links him to the Mau. The word “mau”

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has many meanings including to “keep, retain,” to “grip, tight,” to “[h]old fast, stick firmly,” to “[l]ive, dwell,” and to have “an abundance (of food) in the village” (Milner 1993: 139). The term also means “[r]ebellion, revolution” (140). But the meaning of “mau” as “[e]vidence” or “testimony” is perhaps the most salient (141).23 After over 50 matai were banished, O. F. Nelson pleaded the Mau’s case in Parliament with a petition signed by 145 matai. In it he evoked the idea of the Mau as testimony: “‘We bear witness to the following: starting from ourselves and our wives, even to our children, we all complain together of the weight of the load we have to carry nowadays, brought about by some laws made expressly for the Samoans, oppressing us to the point of slavery, whereas we cannot believe this to be our status’” (quoted in Field 1984: 94). Pepe’s writing in Book Two is nothing else if not a testimony to oppression. While testifying to his commitment to the oral tradition during his “Trial of the Native Son” and to Tagata’s efforts to resist the commodification of land in “Last Will and Testament of the Flying-Fox,” Pepe nevertheless urges that “this humble testament” be read “with fifteen grains of Epsom salts” (159; my italics). He implies that while this is an “honest” telling (159), it is also told through fiction. As we have seen, in true magic realist fashion, Wendt’s novel is a blend of memory, history, and fiction, the personal which casts an interpretive light on the historical, creating perhaps a “truer” or more “verisimilar” form of both history and fiction. This truer version refuses to incorporate the occult memories of resistance within the realms of the historical that have persistently marginalized it. The historical and popular inflection of the testimonial has been connected to the emergence of magic realism in Guatemala where the stories of popular struggle against successive dictatorships counterbalanced and “generate[d] the most imaginative ‘flights’” of magic realism and Boom literature (Zimmerman 1995: 13–14).24 As we will see, Pepe’s testimony in Book Two provides the fertile ground out of which the magic realist character Galupo emerges. But Pepe’s fabulously dying body which precipitates writing the novel about himself invokes the deepest failure of the Administration: the influenza epidemics. Tauilopepe, after all, loses his father and all four brothers to influenza. The epidemics account for why, even though he is the youngest and most disgraced son, he inherits his father’s title. While Pepe dies of tuberculosis and Toasa’s wife of leprosy, the specter of deaths due to diseases brought by Europeans takes on a ghastly form in accounts of the influenza epidemics. In 1918 a Spanish Influenza pandemic (also known as the “Spanish Lady”) caused the deaths of 15 million people worldwide. People suffered from fever, headaches, respiratory problems, and pneumonia which, if untreated, led to death. The fledgling New Zealand Administration, in full awareness that the ship Talune from New Zealand had been quarantined in Fiji for an outbreak of pneumonic influenza, allowed the ship to dock in Western Samoa. As the disease spread, American authorities in Pago Pago offered medical assistance only to be refused by New Zealand officials. This was a pattern that would continue: “Many people who tried to help in the emergency were stopped by New Zealand officials. A group of Apia women tried to establish a hospital but it was closed down. The doctor at Tuasivi Savai‘i,

Recounting the past, telling new futures 87 hid in his house and refused to visit the sick. There were so many people dying that, after being wrapped in mats, the dead were collected on trucks and taken for burial in mass graves” (Meleisea 1987a: 129). So many were buried that experts estimate some seriously ill people may have been mistakenly buried alive. In some villages whole households were struck down. In these cases, entire houses were set on fire. Robert Logan, the administrator during the World War I military occupation, offered little assistance and failed to comprehend the offensiveness of mass burial and mass cremation for Samoans. A boy student at Malua LMS College tried to drown himself after witnessing the horrors of the disease. He became violent when people attempted to stop him. When mission printer Harry Griffin telephoned Robert Logan for assistance in locking the boy up until he recovered, Logan replied, “‘You didn’t allow him to drown, you can look after him’” (Field 1984: 44). In addition to being traumatic on a personal level, the epidemic also produced a kind of mass societal trauma. A United Nations report published in 1948 called the Samoa case “‘one of the most disastrous epidemics recorded anywhere in the world during the present century’” (Field 1984: 49). One-fift h or 22 percent of a total population of 38,000 died of influenza that year, and many died the following year of related illnesses (Meleisea 1987b: 121). Samoa, of all the nations in the world, “had suffered a disaster on a scale no other nation had experienced”: The statistics are bald, and in human terms the suffering was quite beyond comprehension. Not only was every fourth or fift h person dying a painful and lonely death, but everybody else was so sick that they could do nothing to help. Samoans place great value on tradition and burying the dead was an important ritual. But not only did they have to watch mass deaths, they had to suffer the indignity of watching their brothers and sisters, parents and relatives, tossed into mass graves with the minimum of ceremony. Trauma on such a scale leaves deep scars. (Field 1984: 50; my italics) Though there had been three other outbreaks of disease, the 1918 influenza epidemic was the beginning of the realization that the Administration was composed of “bumblers and people not fit to run someone else’s nation” (50).25 The epidemic also threatened to destroy the web of familial and genealogical connections, the fabric of social relations. In many Samoan families the disease killed all adults, leaving children and infants without guardians (Field 1984: 47). In the space of six days, Nelson lost his mother, sister, brother, and sister-in-law. This was a story repeated in every family. Prominent leader Toleafoalagolago lost his mother, brother, two sisters, his brother’s wife, and a nephew. Matā‘afa Iosefa, along with his wife and other family members, also died. When a chief died in Apia, 17 men came to retrieve him. None of the 17 men returned, having all died in Apia. The higher death rates among older matai caused a decline in traditional political activity and fueled the resentment that led to the budding nationalism of the Mau (Davidson 1967: 97).

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Ten years later, the Administration allowed yet another influenza epidemic to occur. In the novel Tauilo remembers his father’s death: A district of neglected plantations fast choking with weeds and creepers, of helpless victims wheezing with fever behind lowered blinds, excreting where they lay, until the final break of breath deep down in their chests . . . But God’s anger was not appeased until about a fift h of the Sapepe population had died. Tauilopepe had helped his father and Toasa bury the dead, wrapping them in mats and lowering them into mass graves, until he was hollow-eyed and feverish from lack of sleep and fear. But he had continued to pit his strength against Toasa’s and his father’s. Believed he had won when his father, one morning, told him to go out alone. When he returned home that evening his father was dead. (88) In this second epidemic in 1929, the ship Maui Pomare landed in Auckland with an ill crew. The ship was fumigated and the crew replaced. When it approached Apia, 500 Mau protested at the wharf. Failing to realize that this was a deeply traumatic recurrence for Samoans, Allen allowed the ship to land (Field 1984: 139). The popular New Zealand response to the Mau was to claim that under colonial rule Samoans had become “a healthy race of people, with a good birth rate and freedom from tropical diseases” (139). The New Zealand authorities were so convinced by their own propaganda that they could not believe that a second epidemic had broken out. It is clear that the Mau was a protest against the incompetence and heartlessness of New Zealand rule, indeed the violence of that rule to genealogical continuity. However, Pepe does not die of influenza but rather of a related respiratory illness, tuberculosis, that most pernicious disease of writers and poets. Pepe’s dis-eased body evokes the western myths of the dying Polynesian and autogenocide associated with Native peoples, concepts to which the New Zealand authorities also subscribed. Colonization was often justified through the myth of auto-genocide, or the idea that “savage” or “primitive” races would vanish as a result not of contact, extermination, or incompetence on the part of colonizers, but of their own savagery. Those who cannot be cured or civilized are inevitably “doomed to fall by the wayside” of “progress” (Brantlinger 2003: 43). By the end of the nineteenth century the overdetermined European image of the dying Polynesian was “a colonialist mantra” (Edmond 1997: 14–15). It legitimated incursions into the Pacific as varied as imperialist dispossession and romantic, primitivist appropriation. Stevenson’s In the South Seas focuses on a dying narrator whose own death is imaged in a declining Marquesan world that “passively accept[s] [its] inevitable extinction” (Edmond 1997: 161, 164). In Melville’s Typee, the tattooed native becomes an “illustrated book of life” which registers contact (Edmond 1997: 208–9). Indeed, Pepe’s story strains against representations of the native as a reflection of a dying west. The spectacle of his dying body, the skeleton-stranger he

Recounting the past, telling new futures 89 sees in the mirror and the maggots that will bubble from his flesh “as beautiful as diamonds” are a text which testifies, as does his “novel,” to the physical and sociocultural effects of colonialism (227, 229). In a radical re-figuring of the trope of the doomed Polynesian, Pepe’s story and his own fabulously dying body refuse death. For the maggots, as Toasa’s cosmogonic story professes, will become people, just as out of the influenza epidemics the Mau rebellion rises to re-claim the Samoan right to self-government. Here, the oral tradition transforms the past into a guide for future action. Like the Mau orators, Toasa’s tales of the mythical Pepesa inspire Pepe’s own rebellion. He is careful to note the manner in which Toasa relates the story: This night, for some reason, he tells me, and tells me slowly as if he does not want me to ever forget it. This is the summary of the story of Pepesa’s death which Toasa told me that night. (172) By noting that the account given is merely a “summary” of one of Toasa’s tellings, Pepe underscores the situational and provisional nature of the oral, the sense in which its retellings are constantly being adapted to different circumstances and requirements. Pepe explains that the legends about Pepesa—which bear a striking resemblance to those of Maui—are place-specific and situational: they “do not appear in the stories of other districts. If they do appear they are different to the Sapepe stories in many ways” (172). In Toasa’s version, Pepesa is the illegitimate son of the god Tane and a mortal woman. He is born a “clot of blood,” an ‘alu ‘alu toto, suggesting a premature or even aborted birth often associated with aitu.26 Father and son are both unaware of their relation. Tane, in the form of an eel, seduces Pepesa’s daughter, Sina, and takes her to his home in the Ninth Heaven. Pepesa and his seven brave friends assume the form of flying-foxes to rescue Sina who has given birth to Tane’s child. While his friends distract the guards, Pepe rushes into the house, clubs Tane to death with seven blows from a magic warclub, and kills Sina’s child. Dismayed at these events, Sina kills herself. Toasa’s version reveals four possible endings to the story: one in which Pepe kills himself after an old woman reveals that Tane is his father; another in which he disappears after his mother visits him; a third in which he wanders the heavens in search of Sina and her child; and a fourth in which he returns to reunite Sapepe (172–74). Galupo’s nationalist self-fashioning, via the literalization of the oral, abandons the multiplicity of these endings in favor of a single, monologic narrative based on the last account, one which justifies his own presence in the village. The legend of Pepesa functions as genealogy, influencing present-day actions. First, Toasa’s story instructs Pepe in his rebellion against his father. The similarities between Pepe’s and his ancestor Pepesa’s actions are many. Pepe and his accomplices, the “[t]welve disciples,” are like “aitu” risen from the grave—like the ancestor Pepesa returning (190). Just as Pepesa’s friends distracted Tane’s guards, so Pepe’s “disciples” distract the police by setting fire to the Protestant church

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while Pepe and Tagata burgle Tauilo’s store (191). Second, Pepesa’s story is also similar to that of Galupo who is also a prematurely-born illegitimate son who destroys his “father.” Here, Moa is similar to Tane’s first wife who gives birth to a “clot of blood,” Pepesa-Galupo. Third, the tale of Pepesa’s death explains other triangulations. Tauilo lusts after Susana, Pepe’s wife, and adopts Susana’s son, Lalolagi (258–59), just as Tane lusted after Sina and had a child by her. Niu’s marriage to the old pastor, which evokes Sina’s marriage to Tane, is also echoed in Tauilo’s marriage to Teuila who is the pastor Filipo’s daughter. Pepe, in exacting his revenge on his father, is like Pepesa protecting Sina (Niu) from marrying Tane (the old pastor). But each of these evocations of the Pepesa myth is also a transmutation and alteration. In each case the genealogical relation (grandfather–father–Sina) is slightly altered by a genealogical rupture. Susana is not Pepe’s daughter but his wife; Teuila is not Pepe’s daughter but his peer; and Niu is not Pepe’s daughter but his sister. In other words, Pepe’s inability to actually enact his revenge (the killing of his father) causes the discontinuity between the Pepesa narrative and the events in the novel. Pepe is unable to prevent Niu from marrying the pastor, fails to prevent Teuila’s marriage to his father, and fails to prevent Tauilo from adopting Lalolagi. In each case, Tauilo’s quest for prestige is what Pepe cannot overcome. Obsessed with status, Tauilo forces Niu to marry the old pastor; Susana’s love of Tauilo’s power and wealth leads her to allow Lalolagi to be adopted; and Tauilo’s desire for a male heir to his wealth prompts him to marry Teuila. Capitalist economy, then, alters native tradition, just as it prompts Susana to name her son not “Lalolagi Pepesa” in the traditional way, but “Lalolagi Tauilopepe,” according to pālagi custom. This suggests a deliberate break in the oral tradition, genealogy, for in this act of naming she erases Pepe as Lalolagi’s father, replacing him with Tauilo. Similarly, the increasingly commodified relations between people prompt the alteration in the Pepesa legend. Thus, just as the capitalist economy deforms relations between people in marriage, the family, and politics through “use,” discipline, and authoritarianism, so it also alters the relevance of the oral tradition to people’s lives. Even Pepe’s burgling of Tauilo’s store, inspired by Pepesa’s revenge, only succeeds in landing Pepe in jail. Galupo, in contrast, appropriates orality in the service of western modernity. If Pepe’s lineage via his “true” father, Toasa, is manifested through the oral recitation of genealogy, Galupo uses orality to claim descent from the colonial tamā Tauilo. His genealogy also undermines the western form, the naming of Lalolagi Tauilopepe. Both Galupo’s and Lalolagi’s descent lay claim to Tauilo’s wealth and status, the former through native tradition, the latter through western liberal patriarchy, the surname. Galupo’s life story, however, intercedes between Lalolagi and his claim to succession. In this way, Galupo casts himself as the long-lost son returned to make whole his father’s genealogy and reveals the postcolonial nation-state, though clothed in traditional garments, to be shot through with colonial power. Galupo’s chilling tale of the destruction of his adopted family and failed marriage reveals this connection to colonial power. It contrasts starkly with Pepe’s jokes, games, and fanciful tales.

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Playing the wild card: reclaiming orality Galupo is perhaps one of Wendt’s most puzzling and disturbing characters. He appears mysteriously, “like an aitu” “exorcised from the bus” (311). He is immediately linked to both card games and pālagi: “The stranger had a thin nose, a thin mouth, and hollow cheeks, like a joker in the playing-cards or a papalagi” (311; my italics). This description recalls Toasa and Tauilo’s card game that opens the novel, Pepe’s status as Toasa’s hidden card, and cautions us that Galupo is a “wild card,” whose indeterminacy helps him win at the plantation game. Galupo’s status as “joker” also recalls the oral tradition, Pepe’s genealogy and Pepe’s word games where he “take[s] a small joke and build[s] it up till [he] gets a deadly joke” (70, 170). The comparison of Galupo to a pālagi, as we will see, is not inappropriate as he represents the ambivalence of postcolonial nationalism. Galupo’s connection to Pepe’s oral narrative in Book Two is one that few if any critics have noted. His stepping off the bus in Sapepe would be Galupo’s fi rst appearance but for a curious detail in Book Two. Pepe describes Fanua’s husband-murderer as having the face of a “joker in a pack of playing-cards” (222). Pepe also calls him an “evil aitu,” “the other side of myself that I have tried all my life to drive out” (224). This cluster of images—the evil aitu, the pālagi face, and the dark side of Pepe’s self—suggests how colonial presences in Samoa have resulted in the internalization of colonial power. Like the other “jokers”—Toasa, Pepe, and Tagata—Galupo is a masterful tusitala (storyteller). But, unlike his predecessors, he deploys storytelling to manipulate and garner personal wealth and power. His story of being Tauilo’s son by Moa promises to make whole Tauilo’s genealogy. No longer able to father future children, Tauilo is seduced by Galupo’s story. Galupo creates himself as Tauilo’s “son” through a word game similar to the one Toasa and Pepe play: “What’s a miracle?” asked Pepe. “A miracle?” Toasa paused and, looking at Tauilopepe, said, “That’s when something comes out of nothing and nothing comes out of something. Like when fish grow legs and walk ashore.” “Oh,” said Pepe. Toasa laughed. He looked at Tauilopepe and dug him in the ribs with his elbow. “What kind of fish are those?” Pepe asked. “Miracle fish,” replied Toasa. “Can you eat them, eh?” asked Pepe, developing the joke further. (70) Like Toasa and Pepe, the narrator creates Galupo out of Pepe’s words, miraculously creating an identity where none existed before, for Fanua’s “executioner” is a vague and nameless character. Galupo claims in his elaborate tale, “‘My wife died, by the way. Some people who owed me money said I killed her. But I didn’t. I had nothing to gain by killing her’” (367). However, Galupo later cautions that this may be a lie (369). His discursively produced past does not necessarily correspond with the reality heretofore presented in the novel.

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Galupo, then, is a wild card or joker of sorts. The true “hero” if there is one in Book Three is the narrator/author who conjures or exorcises Galupo, the aitu, out of the bus and literally out of the narrative itself. The narrator’s phrase “joker in a pack of playing-cards” refers to Pepe’s description of Fanua’s killer. Subramani argues that the “personality of the author-narrator seems to merge with that of Galupo. After Galupo makes his entry, the overlapping mimetic and allegorical structures, sustained skillfully in a balance so far, give way to fabulation . . . The author-narrator, who was a biographer and historian, becomes a mythologiser” (1992: 138). However, I argue that the chapter “The Mythology of Night-Wave”27 in which Galupo tells his story is a much more contentious battle between the narrator and the aitu exorcized out of Pepe’s narrative. To create Galupo, the narrator transforms the traditional Samoan oral form of the fāgogo through a Borgesian relation beween narrative and the world.28 “Mythology of Night-Wave” is one of the few chapters in which the narrative voice switches from third-person (narrator) to first-person (Galupo) point of view. These changes in voice are set off physically in the text by paragraph breaks, a full line-space, and quotation marks emphasizing the distinct separation between the narrator’s voice and that of Galupo. The tone of the passages distinguishes between a third-person retrospective novelistic voice and Galupo’s impromptu “I” spoken narration. The narrator’s subject matter in the opening is more typical of the Samoan fāgogo that begins with the naming of the main character’s parents. Wendt, in an interview with Marjorie Crocombe, has commented on his fascination with stories which he inherited from his grandmother who, he says, “taught me one important thing: respect for the power of words, and admiration for people who have the gift of words. She also instilled in me an unshakable love for things Samoan . . . Mele Tuaopepe, my grandmother, was one of the greatest storytellers I have ever heard” (1973: 45). Wendt affirms that as a child he was “fascinated by oral literature—stories, poems, chants, legends and myths of our own people,” the rich oral tradition of Samoa (45). He attributes his love of storytelling to her: “Every night she would reward us with fagogo. I didn’t realize until I read Aesop’s fables and Grimm’s fairy tales in English years later that some of grandmother’s stories were from these collections, but she was telling them in the fagogo way in Samoan. Her style and versions of these were better than the originals” (45). Note how the fāgogo has already accommodated European forms such as the fable and the fairy tale.29 Fāgogo tend to begin with the naming of a married couple whose children are going to be the main characters of the story (Long 1999: 233). In Leaves the narrator begins with Galupo’s parentage: “Galupo’s mother had gone to Apia to live with her parents and wait for Tauilopepe. When she realised that he had betrayed her she tried to abort her child. She failed. Seven months after leaving Sapepe she gave premature birth to Galupo and decided to save him—her son would avenge her betrayal” (358). Fāgogo are often told at night, privately, inside individual homes (Moyle 1981: 7). On the night just after the hurricane, Galupo tells his tale after having had dinner at Tauilo’s (356). Also, the narrator’s and

Recounting the past, telling new futures 93 Galupo’s ability to persuade the listener that he is Tauilo’s son through a bizarre sequence of events identifies him as an exceptional tusitala. For the story teller’s ability to capture the audience’s imagination and balance the familiar and the unpredictable are the principal means by which the fāgogo achieves its function in Samoan society (Moyle 1981: 35).30 In addition, the teller of fāgogo often recounts, using the third-person point of view, a story of the child’s triumph over supernatural characters and evil aitu. Galupo begins as the child-subject of traditional fāgogo: he is objectified in the tale itself, not allowed to tell his own story because he is created out of the story itself. However, as an “evil aitu,” he is—like the child-hero of fāgogo tales—also objectified by the teller and the tale. Galupo begins to control increasingly larger portions of the telling until he ends with a shrewd and baffling warning which refers to the metaphor of the card game. He implies he is the wild card, the biggest “joker” of them all: “Your move, father. Good night and don’t, for your weak heart’s sake, spend a sleepless night worrying about what I’ve told you. You might get another attack and then we won’t be able to play our game. And for all you know, I may have been spending the last few hours lying to you: I may not be your son” (369). In fact, Galupo is such a “joker” that he might be called a liar. The action that occurs in “Mythology of NightWave” is a kind of mythologizing that is rather a Borgesian transformation in which the textual world becomes the real world. And this occurs through the power of language. Galupo, then, both child and aitu of his own fāgogo, “hi-jacks” or usurps the narrative that has created him; he begins to tell and embroider even the tale itself. Or, one might say that the narrator’s telling of the fāgogo is so persuasive that the objectified child and aitu becomes an embodied entity who proceeds to “dictate” the narrative. For the succeeding chapter begins with narration from an odd second-person perspective in which the speaker/narrator begins to command Tauilopepe using the second-person imperative: “You sit in your study, afraid, remembering your only real son, who died unloved. Out of his ashes God has fashioned another son to destroy you. You switch on the main light to try to defeat the fearful gloom clogging your thoughts” (370). When the narrator resumes the third-person point of view, Tauilo is what the narrator commanded him to be: “Tauilopepe’s thoughts were silver-fish darting among his fears” (370). Curiously, Tauilo’s disconcerting thoughts are compared to the metaphorical “miracle fish,” evoked by Toasa and Pepe as representative of the power of orality. This “hi-jacking” maneuver, the moment at which object becomes subject, is at the heart of what Jorge Luis Borges has termed “partial magic.” In his essay “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” Borges argues that the magic of fictional texts lies in their ability to cause confusion between “the world of the reader and the world of the book” (1964: 194). This provocative essay discusses various texts, among them Cervantes’ Don Quixote in which the barber passes judgment on another book of Cervantes’, Galatea. The barber deems Galatea inventive and novel but ultimately inconclusive (194). In Thousand and One Nights, Borges says the 602nd night is the most magical of all because Scheherazade tells the

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king his own story: “He hears the beginning of the story, which comprises all the others and also—monstrously—itself. Does the reader clearly grasp the vast possibility of this interpolation, the curious danger? That the queen may persist and the motionless king hear forever the truncated story of the Thousand and One Nights, now infinite and circular” (195). This blurring of object and subject also occurs in Josiah Royce’s The World and the Individual where the author asks us to imagine that we have traced an exact map of England on a portion of the soil of England: “This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity” (196). Why are these examples so disturbing? Borges asserts, “if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious” (196).31 This is precisely Galupo’s condition. As a voracious reader, he mistakes the novels for the real world and claims that the world beyond the text is the “OtherWorld.” His hoard of books and magazines that he keeps in his hut are his world, and Galupo himself is a miracle fish—produced out of narrative—swimming through them: Novels in particular were his world. He lived in them as if he was swimming through a coral reef which changed shape and colour and mood continuously, watching the fabulous fish dancing in wonderful silence . . . Novelists were gods: they created worlds, fashioned and then destroyed their creations. . . . He thought of his hut as a vibrant mind in which he read and dreamt safe from the world . . . The hut was his world, as distinct from what he started calling the ‘Other-World,’ which was inhabited by ‘Other-Worlders.’ (360–61) Among his favorite books are Borges’s Ficciones and another particularly Borgesian one, the Encyclopedia Britannica. The latter creates a world through discourse, and the former comments on this discursive production. Of course, like Borges’s reader, Galupo is a character in a fictional work, Wendt’s novel, but also a character in the narrator’s fāgogo, who also exists within Wendt’s world of fiction. And, like the barber, the map, and the king, Galupo refuses to remain in his place inside the frame of the fāgogo narrative, as an objectified character. Rather, he explodes out of the fāgogo and proceeds to control his own story. If Galupo is a reader who mistakes books for reality, the reader might also be scripted into Wendt’s text and may mistake Wendt’s text for reality. Wendt thereby undermines the entire premise of his heretofore apparently realist novel that has been actually referencing historical events in the manner of magic realism. What Borges’s examples also describe is a subversion of the author’s “author-ity.” By creating a character who is also a reader commenting on the author, Wendt subverts the author’s primacy as creator of his characters. And, if Galupo is one of these character-readers who subverts the author’s primacy by disregarding his origin out of the narrative itself and becoming the teller of his

Recounting the past, telling new futures 95 own tale, might we readers not also begin a subversion of our own by becoming authors of our own futures? Borges explores this very possibility in his short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (hereafter “Tlön”), the first text in his collection Ficciones. “Tlön” is a story in which Borges presents a world that has been methodically conceived by a group of scholars and which eventually achieves a substantial existence and substitutes itself for his planet’s reality. The story also presents Borges’s notion of reality as “a dreamed object which acquires such life and solidity that it dissolves terrestrial order” (Barrenechea 1965: 122–23). The encyclopedia of Tlön—which is reprinted in manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized reeditions and pirated editions—simultaneously erases and emphasizes the fact that the world influenced by the writings about Tlön (our real world) is a simulacrum, a copy without an original. For the original text on Uqbar from the Anglo-American Cyclopedia that contained the entry on Tlön is a flawed reproduction of the Encyclopedia Britannica. However, at the heart of Tlön and its influences on the world is the ambivalent interaction between text and world. On the one hand, the reprints of the 1914 Encyclopedia of Tlön lead to the creation of an actual compass that uses the alphabet of Tlön. This marks “the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality” (Borges 1993: 19). On the other hand, Tlönian ideas are also associated with totalitarianism. The narrator believes that the need for order and symmetry which drives people to “submit to Tlön” is the same which leads people to accept fascism and racism: “Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?” (21). As Daniel Balderston brilliantly argues, Borges’s critique of history has its basis in the notion that the horrors of fascism revealed Hegel’s grand teleologies to be untenable (1993). Evoking fascist and nationalist politics of revisionary history, the author of “Tlön” mourns how schools have already been “invaded by the (conjectural) ‘primitive language’ of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (fi lled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty—not even—that it is false” (Borges 1993: 21). Far from mere mimetic representation, discourse—history and encyclopedias—creates reality, produces the nation. García Márquez’s magic realist text One Hundred Years of Solitude, pays homage to this Borgesian notion. Not only is the “author” of the story of Macondo the gypsy Melquíades, Melquíades is also a figure for Borges himself, the librarian of and commentator on the colonial archive (González Echevarría 1990: 23). The final scenes of that novel reveal how the history of the nation has already been written; indeed, the nation’s present and future unfold through the process of reading. Significantly, Wendt’s cautionary tale of the nation takes its cue from both Borges and García Márquez. Borges was not, as some believe, the escapist author concerned with verbal games and constructions of “unreality.” Rather, his writing makes oblique and

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often direct reference to twentieth-century politics and history and to historical events. “El milagro secreto” (“The Secret Miracle”), set during the German invasion of Prague, is preoccupied with the rise of fascism, what one character calls “la historia, encarnada en un insensate,” history incarnated in a madman (Balderston 1993: 68). Borges’s problem is to find ways to escape from a nightmare whose author is Adolf Hitler. In the article “1941,” Borges compared Nazism to “an atrocious plot” which makes even fiction seem more realistic or verisimilar than reality under the Third Reich. Borges critiques Hitler’s “plot” as if he were critiquing a piece of fiction: “It seems like an invention of Maurice Leblanc, of Mr. Phillip Oppenheim, or of Baldur von Schirach . . . It suffers from poverty of the imagination, from gigantism, from a crass lack of verisimilitude . . . Unfortunately, reality lacks literary scruples. It permits itself all sorts of liberties” (1941: 22; translated in Balderston 1993: 65). Here, Borges implies that the “Final Solution” was fantastic in the sense of being beyond what we conceive of as occurring in fiction or reality, what we can imagine as probable in the world. The threat of totalitarianism is not confined to Europe: “I am thinking of the local imitators, of the homegrown Supermen, that inexorable chance would provide for us” (1939: 29; translated in Balderston 1993: 64). What Borges suggests—and also what García Márquez’s notion of “outsized reality” suggests—is that one of the beginnings of magic realism lies in the writer’s response to a world whose reality is so horrific that to represent it requires an entirely new “aesthetic.” Even the term “aesthetic” is inadequate for capturing the kind of transformation magic realism represents. In such a context of horrific reality, the fictional world of realist novels seems perhaps “more real” than the fantastic world itself! When reality takes on characteristics of what the literary would term “fantastic,” the work of art (in order to reflect it, to be “realistic”) must take on aspects of the fantastic: this is not an aesthetic illusion; it must be done. In Wendt’s Leaves, traumatic historical events—such as the influenza epidemic or the repeated attempts to disempower traditional Samoan oratory, events that had no precedent and therefore may have been almost inconceivable for Samoans—are represented in the narrative obliquely through shadowy reference. This kind of oblique reference is one form in which magic realism represents the unrepresentable traumatic histories of the colonized, one that has been revised by official history. What Balderston’s reading of Borges and my reading of Wendt point to is the way in which the early definitions of magic realism by Angel Flores become problematic.32 As Tommaso Scarano points out, Leal’s definition of magic realism which valorized the reference to the actual history of Haiti in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo was in direct opposition to Flores’s valorization of the fantastic and the unreal in Borges.33 As Balderston’s analysis shows, Borges’s fantastic mode of narration had everything to do with the “unreal” history of fascism, for example. Wendt, in his meticulous evocation of Samoan history, evokes a similar historically grounded reading of Borges. But “Tlön” also reveals how realism depends upon the ethnographic practice of documenting cultures, how an imaginary country can be produced out

Recounting the past, telling new futures 97 of the methodological precision of an ethnographer’s report: “Ethnography is always literature. The authoritative voice of method is as literary, as fantastic, as the stories that it uncovers” (González Echevarría 1990: 172–73). Likewise, rather than re-presenting the history and ethnography of Samoa, Wendt comments upon these discourses within the novel form. Samoan practices of genealogical recounting, for example, are not presented literally but rather metaphorically. Samoa itself is presented via a fictional village. The Mau resistance movements are referenced via shadowy, glancing metaphors and through Pepe’s autobiographical fiction. Even Pepe’s autobiography is always already partially ethnographic since he presents himself as a “native.” The metaphorical representation of historical events is central to Borgesian “magic” because causality in Borges, in its reliance on “tropological relations,” is fantastic and magical. These relations mirror the logic of primitive medicine that relies upon “secret connections between events” (González Echevarría 1990: 163). The fantastic and magical in primitive cures depends upon “tropological relations between wound and cure, or between cure and the weapon that inflicted the wound. Primitive medicine is based on belief in such a system of metaphors; magic would be the efficacy of such a system in affecting reality” (163). Likewise, the materializing metaphor—of which Galupo is an example—so characteristic of magic realist texts enacts the “process of literalization” which cancels the border between metaphorical and magical (Oliva 1999: 177). The close link between shamans and dreams, “primitive” thinking and psychosis, produces the principle of concretism which implies a direct relation between thinking and the physical world (177). In his essay “Towards a New Oceania,” Wendt sets forth his notion of the writer as shaman: Our dead are woven into our souls like the hypnotic music of bone flutes: we can never escape them. If we let them they can help illuminate us to ourselves and to one another. They can be the source of new-found pride, self-respect, and wisdom. Conversely, they can be the aitu that will continue to destroy us by blinding us to the beauty we are so capable of becoming as individuals, cultures, nations. We must try to exorcise these aitu both old and modern. If we can’t do so, then at least we can try and recognise them for what they are, admit to their fearful existence and, by doing so, learn to control and live honestly with them. We are all familiar with such aitu. For me, the most evil is racism; it is the symbol of all repression. (1983a: 73) This “aitu” of racism which is institutionalized in colonialism is what Wendt calls “our perpetual cross in Oceania” which continues “to wound, transform, humiliate us and our cultures” (74). The only way to exorcize the aitu is to “understand colonialism and what it did and is still doing to us” (74). Galupo himself is an aitu, a product of both old and contemporary Samoa, the result of Tauilo’s pursuit of prestige via capital, the use of women, and the

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church. As such, Galupo shows how colonial culture heightens the possibility for oppression within the postcolonial nation. The narrator’s critique of capital contends with Galupo’s will to capitalize on the future of the independent nation. Galupo, it seems, wins. He represents the “blasphemous corruption of powerful elites who attempt the status of Divinity and will go to any lengths to achieve and to maintain their glorified positions” (Va‘ai 1999: 83).34 However, he is also the product of a long historical trajectory which has produced the complexity of Samoan culture that has absorbed aspects of western culture as well. Galupo represents an elite, reactionary form of postcolonial nationalism that fabricates via the oral tradition its connection to the Mau even while it maintains the European capitalist economic relations that have undermined traditional authority. In this way, the novel critiques how chiefly authority in postcolonial Samoa appropriates orality for its corrupt ends. The tusitala-narrator produces, like Toasa, a wild card, conjured like an aitu out of testimonial, and thereby articulates the possibility of an independent future. Galupo presents himself as the returning Pepesa of legend who will reunite the village and bring about the postcolonial nation. He declares himself the “product of the history and whole movement propelling our country towards an unknown future.” “I am that future,” he says (412). The metaphorical cure, Galupo, promises to restore the broken genealogy that are the effects of colonial power. However, the narrator’s complete control in authoring this curative future is undermined by the metaphor himself who begins to control greater sections of the narrative. The promise of decolonization, then, is betrayed by the very ambivalence produced by colonialism itself.35 Thus, the institution of the new Samoan nation through Galupo’s orally constructed link to Tauilo’s genealogy reveals the “constitutive anxiety” of nationalism, the anxiety with regard to “adulteration.” This anxiety is “eased” through a kind of genealogical grafting enacted through Galupo’s fāgogo. Moreover, Galupo’s story itself manufactures a tale of adultery and claimed parentage and foregrounds its constructed nature. In the final pages of the novel, Galupo’s unspoken thoughts reveal, “Now you will never know the truth about me. It isn’t important any more that I am not really your son. What is important is that I made myself your son. Who my real parents were and where I came from are totally irrelevant now” (411). Thus, while Wendt refers to Galupo as the nation that will repair and make whole the traumatic losses under colonialism, he simultaneously refers to the constructed nature of this national identity, the way the wholeness and completeness that the nation promises is a constructed narrative authored and read, created and consumed. And, because this is so, the postcolonial artist, writer, and storyteller or tusitala, through the power of the oral tradition and a critique of totalizing narratives, might also shape the future of the emergent nation. This is the contest between narrator and national future articulated in Book Three. After all, Galupo remains an aitu, the unfinished work of decolonization that both the novelist and the nation must work to exorcize.

3

“Fostering” a new vision of Maori community Trauma, history, and genealogy in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

Webs of events that grew together to become a net in life. Life was a thing that grew wild. Keri Hulme (1983: 90)

Kerewin Holmes, the protagonist of The Bone People, searches for the design to this “net in life” among her eclectic library of books on history, psychology, religion, astrology, Tarot, and I Ching. But these “charts of self-knowledge,” as she calls them, disappoint: “None of them,” she confesses, “helped make sense of living” (90). As the sun rises, she contemplates returning home to Moerangi, taking “the glimmering road to the past” into a new world, Te Ao Hou (90). Her search to make sense of living takes her through the detective work of historians and psychoanalysts only to re-discover the layered design of whakapapa, Maori genealogy. The Bone People is the story of a part-Maori woman artist who lives estranged from her family in a stone tower in the South Island of New Zealand. The autobiographically named protagonist Kerewin Holmes befriends Simon, a mute delinquent Pakeha1 boy, and his part-Maori foster father, Joe Gillayley. She investigates the boy’s mysterious origins, only to discover they remain clouded by a boatwreck and connections to Irish aristocracy. Simon is also the victim of physical abuse by Joe who is haunted by his own abusive childhood. The novel sets out the terms on which these characters and their terrible pasts might come together as a new community. Keri Hulme’s novel appeared to wide acclaim in 1983—eight years after the Maori Land March and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal, and 15 years prior to the Crown’s settlement with the Kai Tahu iwi (tribe) in 1998. As such, the novel imagines a bicultural future yet to emerge, one whose vision still has much to inspire today. Since the publication of Hulme’s novel, Kai Tahu have renegotiated their relation to the Pakeha state. Beginning in 1991, after the release of a Waitangi Tribunal report, the Crown began negotiations with the iwi for redress of land claims. In the mid-nineteenth century, Kai Tahu signed formal land sale contracts with the Crown for about 80 percent of the South Island (34.5 million acres) for the paltry sum of £14,750. In return, Kai Tahu received only 35,757

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acres of the promised 10 percent (or 3.4 million acres) of these lands. Crownowned assets, not private land or homes, were the object of the reconciliation negotiations. In 1997, after other tribes rejected the Crown’s controversial onetime settlement called “the Fiscal Envelope,” the Crown and Kai Tahu came to a final settlement of $170 million, the return of Aoraki (Mt. Cook)—which was then “gifted” back to the people of New Zealand—and an official apology and recognition of the tribe’s cultural rights and mana. Kai Tahu—because of the generous settlement—occupies something of a privileged position in relation to other tribes. The Bone People’s South Island is a “place” whose layered and repressed historical temporalities—nineteenth-century contact, trade, and boy convict transportation—resurface within the everyday lives of Hulme’s characters in the manner of traumatic realism.2 Yet, these entangled and repressed histories, these “webs of events,” establish the basis for a new bicultural community whose relations perpetuate and are perpetuated by genealogy and orality.3 But how might a character’s actions be understood in relation to events that occurred hundreds of years ago? Maori notions of genealogy presuppose an intimate connection with the past. Whakapapa memorializes a person’s descent from the gods, through the mortal generations, and even through canoe voyages from Hawaīki (the mythic homeland). The term whakapapa literally means “to lay one thing upon another” or to lay one generation upon another (Barlow 1998: 173). The past coexists with the embodied present, constituting a person’s location and being. As Hulme explains, “[W]e don’t see time as something that’s rigid. You can condense it, you can interact with it, people who were long ago are still around now in a very real sense. They’re not just ghosts, they’re not just people you carry on your shoulders, they are there. They are you, in fact” (1990: 9; my italics). As in Hawaiian notions of time, the Maori past (mua) occurs in front and the future (muri) occurs behind such that one goes “backwards into the future” (9). Not only does whakapapa destabilize history itself—its objectified past-ness—it also requires new approaches to narration and literary notions of “character.” Rather, the psychological and motivational explanations for events and actions—indeed, the western humanist subject itself—are set aside in favor of a layered, interwoven collective sense of genealogy. As Patricia Grace writes in Potiki, genealogy as represented in the spiral interlinks points in time that collectively constitute one’s being: the centred being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being names “past” and “future” only for our convenience . . . So the “now” is a giving and a receiving between the inner and outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely. (1995: 39)4

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A person’s being is produced out of these moments on the spiral, the past or future, which resonate in the present. “History” is radically re-figured, neither re-presented in novelistic form, nor invoked as “context” or objectified past; rather, the past re-emerges allusively, without direct reference, in shadowy and glancing evocations. Not a direct “quotation,” in its re-emergence, it is transformed, becoming an opportunity for transforming one’s relation to the past and the future. Indeed, Hulme’s novel situates Kerewin, Joe, and Simon in relation to genealogies hundreds of years old, even as it provides glimpses into the new community, the “waves of future chance,” that emerges out of these new lived relations (395).

Sexual economy and the land Genealogy, in fact, explains one of the central ambiguities of Hulme’s novel: the protagonist’s sexual ambiguity. Chris Prentice notes that Kerewin’s sexual neutrality suggests an optimistic blueprint for race relations, that bonds need not be biological (1986: 72). Another critic explains Kerewin’s sexuality in terms of the artist’s displacement of the romantic myth, suggesting art has sources other than sexual energy (Hamelin 1993: 115). Kere’s asexuality is actually a symptom of history. In one of the many dream sequences which structure the novel, Kere dreams of a sallow-faced man “suctioning” her throat with his lips. Kerewin, vulnerable and suffering from abscessed teeth, wonders “how to bite?” She asks him, “Are you kissing me?” (186). He replies lazily, wearily, and with a shade of alarm in his dry voice, “I wouldn’t exactly call it kissing.” The pain increases. At the top of her voice, in terror, “He isn’t kissing me?” The shadow people rush in, tearing. Warm gush down her throat. Weakening into black horror. (186) Waking terrified, Kere wonders what she has done to deserve “[d]ream vampires” (187). She refuses Joe’s marriage proposal saying she has not been jilted, abused, or raped, but has always disliked “close contact . . . charged contact, emotional contact, as well as any overtly sexual contact” (265). “‘[I]t always feels like the other person is draining something out of me,’” she reveals (265–66). Although her body is normal, she lacks sexual urge: “I think I am a neuter,” she tells him (266). Kere’s avoidance of intimacy is a symptom of colonial contact, in particular the exchange in Maori women. Vampirism has been deployed elsewhere as a metaphor for capitalism in the Pacific Islands. Albert Wendt’s early poem “What you do now, brother? (to a casual worker)” describes the false promises that “sprout like worms / out of the shiny teeth of our leaders,” and the “fat-bellied limousine of the vampire man and woman [that] fins / by like a shark.” The speaker questions “brother”:

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“Fostering” a new vision of Maori community What you do now, brother? let the vampire men and bitches continue for to feed on the gut of your dream until it is ash?

He incites brother to feed his family on “anger like bullets,” to “go hunt the vampire men and women” because “brother, we got nothing to lose / this tropical paradise it all a vampire’s lie.” Wendt reveals the construction of the Pacific as “tropical paradise” to be an illusion, a commodified representation on the part of vampire developers, politicians, and elites who have dispossessed brother of his land and suck the life out of him while he lies bellyhungry in [his] shack like prison in the swamp [he] rents In Aotearoa capital’s vampirism began as early as 1769 with the exchange of Maori women for European commodities. By the 1810s, it was a significant earner of overseas exchange, exceeding wool, gold, and dairy products. Dr. Fairfowl aboard the Dromedary described the eagerness of Maori women among whom “‘[p]rostitution is not reckoned a crime or a disgrace’”: “‘the chiefs come and offer their unmarried sisters and daughters for prostitution, and expect a present in return’” (Biggs 1960: 15–16). Maori women were contracted as “wives” to sailors for a range of commodities, from muskets and powder to pots, tobacco, and ship’s biscuit (Belich 1996: 153; Biggs 1960: 15–16).5 But Johann Reinhold Forster, the naturalist of Cook’s second voyage, notes the misuse of Maori women “served with reluctancy to the pleasures of the young Men” “who were hard-hearted enough to use them in Spite of their tears” (Cook 1961: 292). Halfcaste children of these unions were known as “utu pihikete” or “paid for with biscuit” (Belich 1996: 251). During the early nineteenth century, rivalry between tribes for “sponsorship” of Europeans led to marriage alliances. Maori women were given in marriage to traders, station managers, sealers, whalers, or ship captains, including those known as Pakeha-Maori.6 Often informal and sometimes temporary, these arrangements were “the cement” of Old New Zealand by which traders and captains guaranteed their safety through marriage to chiefly women (Belich 1996: 172). But, the betrayal of women during early contact proves to be a double betrayal in the post-Treaty period when a large number of Maori wives (the reverse—Pakeha women marrying Maori men—rarely occurred) were demoted to social outcasts and mistresses in the New New Zealand (Belich 1996: 253). Kerewin’s descent from the rangatira (chiefly) class on her Maori side reveals how her own ancestry as a Maori woman may be the means by which this historical past resurfaces in the form of traumatic realism. She re-lives the past, re-experiences events and embodies these ancestral figures. In light of this history why wouldn’t she distrust the institution of marriage?

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The payment for sexual contract—guns and muskets—wrought a violent economy during the period of the Musket Wars (1818–1830s) during which approximately 20,000 Maori were killed in intertribal wars escalated by the availability of guns. To gain increased access to muskets, tribes developed an agriculture supplying pork, potatoes, and flax to British ships. Through the wars, tribes captured prisoners or slaves to work in agriculture and the trade in women, thereby obtaining more weapons to use against rival tribes. Maori women’s bodies and sexuality, then, were quantified, priced, and sold for specific goods and commodities. However, Maori culture—as well as western-style capitalism—is implicated in the quantification of sex. Joe discusses Maori prohibitions against engaging in sex while carving: “‘you did not lie with a woman or spend your seed, as the euphemism goes. It wasn’t that sex was bad, but because all the energy was tied up in a tapu thing, was needed for it’” (266, my italics). Maori women were also used to negotiate alliances and peace between tribes. A chiefly puhi maiden was expected to make an inter-group marriage of diplomatic importance, one remembered down the generations and invoked whenever contact between tribes was made (Biggs 1960: 25–26).7 If the marriage alliance was not acceptable, the offended party might attack the other in an avenging expedition (taua) as compensation for injury or loss of valuable property such as the puhi herself. The taua included an impassioned speech, a duel (which ceased just prior to death), a feast offered to the offended group, and the additional payment (utu) in valuable property (Biggs 1960: 39–50). While Kere refuses to be an object within the sexual economy, she is also implicated in the economy of violence it perpetuated. This contradiction is signaled temporally: her dream of vampires is followed by a martial arts duel with Joe. Though she beats him in order to defend Simon, her warrior instincts motivate her attack. She screams “with delight inside herself, trembling with dark joy. Fight. Fight. Fight” (190). Later, as she philosophizes on the spiritual and world harmony that grounds Aikido—“the way to reconcile the world, and make human beings one family” (199), a belief she apparently has not internalized— she attributes her “killer instinct” to her Maori ancestors (200).8 Kere enacts “utu,” a form of reciprocity or compensation central to Maori life. Utu is the rule that gifts and deeds must be reciprocated with a return of equivalent or higher value, either immediately or at a later date (Metge 1976: 15). Utu applied to gifts, compliments, goods, and services as well as to insults, injury, and killings. Positive reciprocation helped maintain friendly relations, while negative reciprocation often was swift because mana (spiritual power, influence) was diminished by non-retaliation. So, while Kere’s attack on Joe can be read as an example of the negative form of utu, the novel also critiques this form of reciprocity through Kerewin’s false enactment of the philosophy of Aikido. Joe later de-bunks the romanticization of the Maori warrior as “lies” taught in textbooks that “conceal the children who got the chop, the women and old men stampeded over cliffs, the bloody endless fighting” (338). Kerewin and he are “not too far from the old people”—they “like fighting” (338).

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Maori traditions of warfare were also highly gendered and sexed. Both women and land were considered the spoils of war, and both are female: “the land being fecund, Papatuanuku, a Primal Mother Goddess whose consort was Ranginui, the Sky; and Woman, being herself” (Te Awekotuku 1991: 69). The yoking of women and land within Maori culture is reflected in Te Reo (Maori language): the word “whenua” refers to both land and placenta/afterbirth which is buried on the marae to mark belonging to iwi, land, and place. According to Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, colonization became possible because the warrior society allowed western ways to eclipse female values (1991: 69). Colonization is figured here as an exchange between Maori men and the first European colonizers, themselves men who dealt with, observed, and studied native men. Colonization has had a destructive effect on indigenous gender relations, from family relationships, childrearing, work and social activities, to political and social life (Smith 1999: 151). While Kerewin’s fighting instinct contributes to the escalation of violence due to the trade in women, her neuter asexuality indicates she is nevertheless an object of exchange within that very system. In this system, reproduction becomes a form of consumption. She says of Joe and Simon, “‘Sucking me dry, it feels like. Emotional vampires, slurping all the juice from my home’” (278). Kere shuns the reproductive role by downing a jar of lumpfish caviar, an act which signals a refusal to “stock” mother earth with “replicas of herself” (277). As she sucks out a mouthful of fish eggs, she compares herself to a cannibal who “feast[s]” on her “potential reproductive processes” (277). In contrast, Joe abuses Simon to make up for the absence of reproduction. He desires to remake his “son” in his own image: “I tried to make him as tame and malleable as possible, so I could show myself, ‘You’ve made him what he is, even if you didn’t breed him’” (381). He tries to undo the lack of biological relation by marking Simon’s body as his own. Not only are objects of heterosexual desire commodified, but those of homosexual desire as well. Here, too, the sexual economy breeds violence. The town pederast Binny Daniels gives Simon a dollar for allowing him a kiss. Joe beats Simon for involvement in this economy. The circuit of sex for money is broken when Kerewin tells Simon she will give him all the money he needs and that Joe’s relatives will give him all the kisses he wants (137). The source of “payment” is separated from the source of affection. Joe’s abuse, however, is also another form of exchange, utu.9 He beats Simon as revenge against his homosexual cousin, Luce, who spreads gossip about Simon taking after Joe who has had a prior homosexual relationship. Here, utu is implicated within the commodified structures established by Maori trade with Europeans. Simon’s final crippling beating is the result of a similar economy. After Kerewin rejects his marriage proposal, Joe instructs Simon to avoid the Tower. Simon, in need of money, visits Daniels whom he finds dead, drunkenly sprawled in a puddle of sherry. The child seeks out Kere who tells him he should not visit again. She inquires about her favorite knife which she suspects, correctly, that he has “borrowed”; she agrees to forego the other stolen items if he returns the knife. A fight ensues and Simon kicks in the belly of her guitar. He clearly antici-

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pates violence since he was beaten earlier for visiting Daniels. His fight with Kere is laced with images of the dead Binny “floating in and out of view, flies humming over him in a black racing cloud” (304). Kere’s missing knife becomes, in this scene, a locus of the economy of objects, sexuality, and violence. The knife itself is a commodity fetish that emphasizes the relation between property, violence, and identity, its status as imported object, thing to be possessed. Carved with Kere’s initials in runes, it is “[m]ade from German steel, superbly tempered. The bone handle is riveted with three steel pins, and near the pommel is a brasslined hole. A thong of rawhide can be twisted through the hole and looped over the knife handle. The thong is attached to the sheath. The knife can’t fall out” (303–4, my italics). Later, Simon breaks the shop windows along one side of a street, emphasizing the destructive nature of Kerewin’s attachment to her possessions. Simon’s subsequent beating is the result of an exchange between the three. When Joe calls Kerewin to ask for permission to beat him, she agrees and in turn beats Simon with her words, a particular Maori form of censure (307).10 Joe’s abusiveness, according to Hulme, is the result of contact itself: “[I]n Maori society, certainly up until contact with Pakehas, there was no such thing as child beating. You did not hit children. It was believed that it destroyed their spirit . . . The old people were a spirit-filled people” (1994b: 139). In the final form of payment, Simon returns Joe’s beating, stabbing Joe in the belly with a shard of glass from the shop windows. Interestingly, this action strikes at the heart, literally, of Joe’s being, for part of his middle name, “Ngakau” means mind-heart, which is located in the belly.11 Kere’s asexuality, like her rejection of marriage, is part of a larger attempt to remove herself from the capitalist economy of exchange. Her livelihood as “a fisher, a forager, a hunter-gatherer, not a farmer” mimics the anthropological notion of pre-contact Maori tribes (106). While she seems to subsist outside an economy, her lottery winnings, possessions, the Tower itself, and her eventual relation to Joe and Simon reveal that she is implicated unwillingly in an economy of objects, money, and violence. In contrast, Simon’s relation to objects, characterized by communal ownership and borrowing, lies somewhat outside capitalist economy and exchange. Simon’s “borrowing” is distinct from his desire to own (206). His relation to toys is non-possessive. Not knowing why he should value them, he openly gives them away to his cousins (204). Kere thinks, “I have a suspicion that . . . you [Simon] never had any sense of property, just that of need, and you thought everyone else was really the same way too” (323). His relation to property is more similar to indigenous attitudes of communal ownership in Maori society. For example, goods produced by communal effort such as canoes, fishing nets, the meeting house, and foodstuffs belonged to the group. Households, according to need, shared goods among themselves. Land also belonged to the entire hapū (sub-tribal grouping) and ultimately the entire iwi; it could not be alienated without tribal consent. Simon’s demonstrated generosity can also be read as a kind of openness central to Polynesian cultures of exchange. Maori did not aim to secure a bargain but rather gave generously as doing so increased the mana of the giver (Metge 1976: 13–15).

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Even Simon’s tendency to “borrow” signifies doubly as both Maori borrowing and boy convict thieving. His first act of “borrowing” occurs when he takes Kere’s black queen chess piece. Kere reads his action as “sneakthievery” (34), but it is also a form of indigenous borrowing. In Maori culture, borrowing was governed by strict rules: an article could be borrowed but had to be returned when finished with or on demand and should be acknowledged with a gift or counter-loan. Gift exchange could be delayed for months or years (Metge 1976: 14–15). Simon, after stealing the chess piece, leaves behind his sandal and later gives Kere an even more generous gift, his rosary and signet ring. While being of greater overt value, the gift expresses his desire for reciprocity, that Kere in return forge familial linkages as Simon’s substitute mother. At other times, Simon seems to engage in thievery (borrowing without compensation), as in his taking Kere’s knife. On the one hand, his hoarding of her possessions is a form of petty larceny; on the other hand, it might be a “call for help” (206), an attempt to kindle Kerewin’s maternal and familial feelings. This form of reciprocity is relevant to Tiaki Mira’s discussion of land. The land Joe inherits was passed to Mira’s grandmother through an aunt who had never married, suggesting how marriage (western and Maori) alienates land as exchangeable entity, objectifies it in the same way that it commodifies women. Tiaki Mira says the land is not quantifiable; it is of “[i]ncalculable value” (370). Evoking the spiritual connection between the land and tangata whenua,12 he asks, “How do you weigh the value of this country’s soul,” the “heart of Aotearoa”? (370). Private ownership of land led to increased competition between tribes and the end of the appropriate nurturing relation to the land: “We ceased to nurture the land. We fought among ourselves. We were overcome by the white people in their hordes. We were broken and diminished. We forgot what we could have been, that Aotearoa was the shining land” (364). Tiaki Mira’s attorney assesses the 796 acres and its private beaches as “nearly worthless unless you care to develop it” (376). The spirit of the land (mauri)13 has retired into itself and may be destroyed while it sleeps. In order to resuscitate it, people must change: “the whole order of the world would have to change, all of humanity” (371). In the meantime, all Joe can do is “look after the precious matters which are [his] heritage, and wait, and hope” (371). Like the land, toward the end of the novel, Simon’s spirit has been pushed far below the surface. His connection to the land is revealed during the earthquake. While the land reshapes itself and casts up the mauri, Joe thinks to himself, “Now the gift has been taken back, and I have only myself to blame. As I have only the memory left, of his love and his pain, his joy and badness and sadness, of four years, almost of growing” (380). Joe also realizes that he has treated Kerewin—who suffers from cancer— as developers and farmers have treated the land: “Don’t accept merely what she can offer, make her give and take more . . . now I can see other possibilities” (381). The land can only be awakened, as Mira says, by nurturing and “loving” it, a mode he contrasts with development schemes such as dams, logging, and sheep farming (371). Kere’s abdominal cancer is a physical manifestation of the improper devel-

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opmental relation to land. Returning to a proper relation requires forming new genealogical relations out of the old. When Kere finds the pounamu pendant, she dreams of an underground marae14 and the earth, Papa, alive, breathing. She hears a voice cry out, “Keria! Keria!” (“Dig! Dig!”), the ancient call of peace marking the end of warfare and the beginning of cultivation.15 But the nurturing relation to the land which the epilogue articulates comes about only by following the ancient voice that commands her, “Te tahoro ruku!” (253). Tāhoro means to throw down a structure or to “[c]ause to crumble down” (Williams 1957: 360). Ruku has several meanings, among them, to “[l]et oneself fall, hurl oneself,” to “[p]erform ceremonial ablutions,” and to “[g]ather together” (351). Rukutanga literally means to gather the bones of a corpse and deposit them in the fi nal resting place (351). These meanings inform Kere’s actions in the second half of the novel: she dismantles the Tower, is laid low by cancer, is reclaimed by her bone person (wairua), cleanses her body and her past through bathing and the burning of the diary, restores the wharenui (ancestral house), and communes again with Joe, Simon, and their whanau (extended family).16 Joe’s burial of Mira enacts a form of rukutanga. “Te tahoro ruku” signifies how peace returns and the land reawakens only through this process of fragmentation and gathering together. The troubling absence of translation in the novel’s glossary for both this phrase and “Keria!” hides the connection between the land and Kere’s healing as well as the role of ancestors in bringing Joe, Simon, and Kere together. After all, Joe only realizes the larger spiritual significance of their relationship when Tiaki Mira reveals that he and his grandmother have waited for them—the broken man, the digger, and the stranger—most of their lives. However, this gathering together is not a nation premised upon heterosexual relations, nor on marriage and the nuclear family, nor on strictly blood descent, for Kere and Joe are not sexual partners or married in the usual sense, and Simon is adopted only by Kerewin since Joe is prohibited by law from adopting him. There is no family in the traditional sense. In order for women to be truly free—and for the land to be freed spiritually—they must be free to determine new structures of belonging, or as McClintock has argued, to reform the heterosexual family “as the natural image of national life” (1997: 99). A goal of the emerging body of theory and practice known as “Mana Wahine Maori”— of which Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Donna Awatere, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Leonie Pihama, and Kathie Irwin are key figures—is to move beyond the liberal notions of the subject which underwrite (white) western feminist notions of empowerment. The ultimate goal is a rediscovery and renaming of the “complementary” relationship between genders that may have occurred in Aotearoa two centuries ago (Te Awekotuku 1991: 10; Smith 1999: 152).17 The multiplicity of genders includes relations between men and women in heterosexual relationships as well as a range of same-sex and differently-gendered ones. For example, Te Awekotuku calls for further understanding into the ways colonization and Christianity erased the homosexual from Maori culture. She discusses two legends that suggest the range of genders. Her own ancestress Hinemoa, a “superbly athletic woman,” masqueraded as a male warrior to lure Tiki, the hoa takatāpui of

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another man, Tutanekai (1991: 37). From this legend comes the term “takatāpui” which denotes an intimate same-sex (often male) companion and which is linked to the māhū of Hawai‘i, the fa‘afafine of Samoa, and the fakaleiti of Tonga. But the record of women, Te Awekotuku laments, is even more tenuous. She cites the legend of Wairaka who saved the Mataatua canoe by becoming a man: “Kia whakatane au i ahau.” Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider invokes this legend as well to call attention to the prominent place of women in Maori culture. But Te Awekotuku emphasizes that Wairaka is tellingly pressured into marriage with a man and later leaves him to live with her women friends near what is today known as Owairaka (1991: 37). Kerewin’s own reviving maternality is linked to the rejuvenation of the land, but her maternal feelings do not necessarily translate into sexual reproduction. Kerewin’s sexuality remains an open question at the novel’s close. How are we to read the prohibitions and shame surrounding same-sex attraction: Joe’s relationship with Taki and Polly’s sexual overtures to Kere? Are not these prohibitions gendered signs of colonization? Is Kere’s neuter sexuality ultimately untenable because it fails to transform the capitalist economy? Indeed, her continued relationship with Joe who might be considered bisexual suggests the potentiality of sexualities and genders at the heart of decolonization. Wendt’s Leaves takes up the decolonization of the land and gender relations, though perhaps in more problematic ways. The allegorical structure of Leaves which represents the land as female tends to objectify and limit the female characters, reducing them to somewhat flat embodiments. The appropriation of the feminine and reproductive into the space of the “natural” and spiritual is problematic since it uncritically serves a patriarchal nationalist agenda. Hulme’s exceptionally powerful critique averts this outcome by questioning and transforming the linkages between reproduction, women, and land. The novel suggests alternative readings to Kerewin’s asexuality and Simon’s penchant for stealing—what psychoanalysis would diagnose as sexual disorders and kleptomania. Instead, they are symptoms of broader repressed historical connections between the western capitalist economy and Maori forms of patriarchal exchange that re-emerge through a Maori conception of ancestry. Simon’s criminal tendencies, as we will see, are part of the repressed history of boy convict transportation to New Zealand.

Disciplining the body: penal transportation and evangelicism Though the history of penal colonies in Australia is a well-established and even romanticized aspect of Australian national identity (Nicholas 1988), the history of penal transportation to New Zealand is rarely mentioned, being consigned to the little-known history of child migrants. Hulme recently confirmed her familiarity with this obscure history through Margaret Beames’s work of juvenile historical fiction, The Parkhurst Boys (1986).18 Kerewin’s early encounter with Simon suggests his convict ancestry. She suspects he has filched her jade, that “some local brand of Fagin” has put him up to it (33). The telephone operator informs her that Simon “specialises in sneakthievery [sic] and petty vandalism”

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(34). Later, she and Joe describe him as “vandal,” “vagabond,” “wayward urchin,” and “outlaw” (36–37, 49). Simon’s descent from Timon Padraic McDonnagh, himself a heroin addict, connects the history of boy convicts to the better-known history of penal colonies in Australia. Timon is literally an exile, having been disowned and banished from Ireland for “disgraceful propensities” by his aristocratic grandfather, the Earl of Conderry (99). Among his crimes is arson, an act of revenge against the earl for being rejected as a bastard grandchild (Hulme 1986: 200). Until 1853 the legal term for transportation was “banishment beyond the seas,” and from 1718 it served as substitute for the death penalty (Burnett 1978: 1, 40). Simon is heir to this broader history of penal colonization. Paul Buddee in Fate of the Artful Dodger describes how Britain disposed of its juvenile criminals in various locations, among them Point Puer Boys’ Establishment in Van Diemen’s Land19 and Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, the latter of which “served” 4,088 juveniles between 1838 and 1863. In the early 1840s, overcrowding in Parkhurst led to the transportation of juvenile offenders to New Zealand and Australia as either trained apprentices or free emigrants whom England hoped the colonies would welcome as a source of cheap trained labor. In return, the Crown would “pardon” the juveniles for all crimes. Juvenile prisoners as young as 7 years were transported. Many of the children were undersized and stunted due to malnutrition and inhospitable urban conditions (1984: 14–15). Few of them knew their birthdates. A 14-year-old Parkhurst boy appeared to be about the size of an average 9-year-old boy of the time (24). In Van Diemen’s Land, many juveniles could not be taken in by settlers as apprentices; due to their small stature, few could withstand the taxing work expected of them (37). Simon’s physical appearance connects him to these juveniles. Kere describes him as “small and thin” with a “birdboned chest” (16–17). When Joe finds him after the wreck, he is “thin and fair with arms and legs like sticks” (85). Unable to determine his age, she guesses he is “a bit young to be a burglar” (20). Because his parents are believed dead, Kere and Joe are unable to determine his age, though Kere thinks, “his years seem to vary a hell of a lot. One minute he looks about five, and the next he acts as though he’s ten times as old” (51). Simon’s muteness might also be an historical residue from juvenile conditions at Parkhurst where complete silence at all times was enforced by constant and close supervision (Buddee 1984: 22).20 Speaking on duty was a penal offence punished with solitary confinement or stopped rations, although a boy could avoid these consequences if he learned to speak without moving his lips (15, 26). Though there is no physical reason that prevents him from speaking, Simon’s vomiting when he vocalizes indicates the traumatic nature of prison conditions (86). Part of a larger culture of British prisons of the time, enforced silence was used to effect a Christian repentance, as was the case in the notorious Pentonville prison. Outside their cells, prisoners wore a mask called “the beak” to ensure silence and anonymity. After an 18-month term, they were transported overseas.21 Enforced confinement and silence led to serious psychological disorders, assaults on warders, and suicide attempts. It left prisoners “strangely impressible,” malleable, and

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easily manipulated by the chaplain (Elmsley 1996: 273–74). Simon’s fascination with Binny Daniels also contains echoes of the practice of pederasty in prisons: “if a boy were not corrupted before he reached Newgate, he would have a full knowledge of all criminal and prison sexual practices before he left” (Buddee 1984: 11).22 The period of boy convict transportation coincides almost precisely with British appropriation of Maori lands. In October 1842, just two years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi which dispossessed Maori, the first shipment of 92 boy convicts arrived in Auckland from Parkhurst aboard the St. George. They were to serve a two- to five-year apprenticeship with settler families, after which they would be released as free labor. During the “apprenticeship,” the master provided for the child’s religious welfare, including “Divin [sic] worship” on Sundays and corporal punishment (60). Religious conversion was key to the moral reformation of juveniles. This little-known history was part of the New New Zealand’s repression of its possibly criminal roots, part of a nation’s collective attempt to “forget their origins” and “preserve their reputations and that of their families” (Buddee 1984: 44). The colony’s repression of this history played a key role in the formation of an emerging settler nationalism. Britain’s proposed pardon and transportation of Parkhurst juveniles occurred contrary to the recommendations of a parliamentary committee of 1838 (35) and led to colonial protests against British control. Over the next 10 years, protests against the release of juvenile convictapprentices into settler life became one of the means by which New Zealand negotiated its self-governance from Britain in 1852. Even before the first boatload of boys landed 10 years earlier, settlers were warned to lock up their houses from this “nest of thieves” (63). On June 24, 1843, The New Zealand Journal reported a petition by the New Zealand Society objecting to transportation: it is impossible in the infant state of the colony, that [the juveniles] can be otherwise than marked in a manner which must be most injurious to themselves and the community. Many of the settlers in New Zealand are direct from the penal colonies; all have a knowledge of the evils which have arisen from the convict system. They will consequently be slow to believe in the reformation of these boys, and will attribute to them vices which other convicts have displayed. (70) This passage is remarkable for its ambivalence: on the one hand, New Zealand has been settled by ex-convicts from Australia, and on the other, these boys will be marked forever by their convict pasts. The petitioners distanced themselves from both the Australian ex-convicts and the newly-arrived juveniles by positioning themselves, the source of stereotyping, invisibly and precariously between the two groups. Further, juveniles and adult convicts posed a particular threat to the “infant state,” suggesting that the state itself is more vulnerable and defenseless than the contaminating tide of transported boys. Here, the politics

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of infantilization contrasts with that of Wendt’s orators or even the wardship of Hawaiians. The colonial state itself claims a victimized, childlike status that displaces the actual children. Later that month, The New Zealand Journal published the article “The Parkhurst Boys” which stated that the transport of boy convicts to New Zealand was a “breach of honour” on the part of England: New Zealand, it claimed, was “colonised on the faith that it should never be inundated with a convict population” (72). The article pits the juveniles as “wild beasts”—whose ferocity remains unmitigated by confinement—against the Maori, “the honest ‘savages’” (72). In actuality, boy convicts and Maori are linked by their mutual oppression under settler nationalism as, following the public outcry, many boys hid from authorities in native villages. If never recaptured, they were considered free. Many spent the day in Remuera23 and other native settlements, returning to the towns to commit “depradations” such as loitering in groups or stealing linen (!) (84). In Beames’s The Parkhurst Boys, the boy protagonist Charlie Blackiston, who escapes from servitude under an abusive mistress in Auckland, is cast overboard by an inebriated miner named Crowder. Like Simon, Charlie almost drowns at sea. He eventually finds refuge with a Maori chief Potere who accepts Charlie as a slave to his son Rewa. Kerewin suspects that Simon is a former slave as well because of the hole in the boy’s earlobe: the awl mark of the slave (190). After saving Rewa’s life, Charlie becomes a free member of the tribe. In Beames’s novel, an alliance between Maori and boy convict, Rewa and Charlie, against the greedy settler, Crowder, brings about Rewa’s claim to Charlie as his brother. This novel tells the story of the juvenile transportees from their perspective and thereby reveals the injustices and prejudices they suffered. In contrast, Hulme’s novel is much more complex in telling the story from Simon’s as well as the adult, native, and legal perspectives. Simon, like Charlie who has something of a history of bad behavior, skips school, trespasses at Kerewin’s Tower, breaks shop windows, and loiters with the town pederast. But his crimes, like those of the Parkhurst boys, have a playful side which offends bourgeois settler sensibilities: Simon is arrested for trampling Mrs. Hardy’s lettuces (34). The public protest against transportation in New Zealand was part of a larger anti-transportation movement associated with a rising settler nationalism in other parts of Australasia. In December 1844 the town of Melbourne and the district of Port Phillip gathered in what came to be known as a “monster-meeting” protesting the transport of “Penton-villains” from Pentonville Prison. Transportation was “an act of wanton injustice” to the colonists who believed they would be the inhabitants of a settlement “free from the taint of convict origin” (Evans and Nicholls 1984: 109). The anti-transportation movement was part of an emerging call for self-government on the part of the Australasian colonies. A petition by free colonists in Van Diemen’s Land discouraged the influx of prison labor that resulted in low wages and the departure of skilled free labor. In 1847 the Crown’s representative, Earl Grey, agreed to end transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. However, four years later, he transported 299 convicts not as “exiles” but as ticket-of-leave men who could, in the case of misconduct, be brought back

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under the penal system (103). Grey’s action was called “one of the most flagrant invasions of the rights of British freemen, that ever was attempted by any minister in any age” (124). After 1847 free immigrants had flocked to Van Diemen’s Land in the belief that transportation had ceased forever: “All these persons may now justly complain of the minister’s breach of faith; they may with reason turn round upon him, and say he has acted only as a deceiver” (124, my italics). Grey’s breach of faith led to the uniting of Australasia against transportation. An 1851 petition by the Australasian League, which included New Zealand, denounced Grey’s “subterfuges, evasions, equivocations, and breaches of faith” which have destroyed all confidence in his administration of colonial affairs (129). This denunciation was part of a growing outrage throughout other parts of the empire—including South Africa, Ceylon, and New Zealand—against the looming threat of transportation (Shaw 1966: 325–43). An 1851 intercolonial conference in Australia reminded Britain, the “parent State,” of her moral obligation “not to eject her criminals into other societies” but to “manage and retain them within herself” (345). The delegates questioned Britain’s sovereignty since it denigrated its subject populations with criminals of its own making. By the end of that year, New Zealand joined the Association for Preventing the Revival of Transportation. Grey’s successor, Sir John Pakington, abolished transportation in 1852, not wanting to “extinguish[ ] all loyalty and affection for the mother country” (350). The discovery of gold in Australia and prison vacancies also prompted his decision. The colonial treatment of Maori and transported convicts reveals the class and racial divisions of both empire and settler nationalism. First, in the Treaty of Waitangi, Maori were simultaneously claimed and welcomed as “British subjects” and afforded all “the Rights and Privileges” of that status even while the Maori translations of the treaty only afforded them the “same rights as the people of England” (Sharp 1997: 17). These latter rights could be read as those of exiled convicts who were also (disowned) “people of England,” rights which amounted to little indeed. Second, in order to be welcomed into national life, each was forced to demonstrate their reformation according to the law and religious institutions. Criminals completed their sentences and demonstrated penitence. Maori were converted and assimilated, gradually made to “alienate” their land, and become alienated from the spiritual and cultural significance it embodied. Third, both Maori and convicts were “exiled” by the Crown. Maori, beginning in the post-Treaty period, became exiles in their own land, unwillingly and unwittingly dispossessed of sovereignty by the Crown.24 Convicts were forced to migrate to penal colonies to serve out their sentences because of prison overcrowding, difficult urban living conditions, or famine. Simon’s father, Timon, like many transported convicts, can be seen as a committer of seditious acts. Transports to Sydney included Scottish Jacobins, Irish rebels, Luddites, Chartists, and Fenians (Rudé 1978: 157–58). Most, however, were despairing and starving men who stole a loaf of bread, poached a rabbit, or thieved a handkerchief to avoid starvation for themselves and their families (7). The British Larceny Act of 1827 (8 Geo 4, c. 29, sect. 12) warranted the death penalty

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for breaking and entering, and stealing while “putting anyone in fear” (Burnett 1978: 40). Felonious stealing was a capital offense, substitutable by a sentence of seven years’ transportation. Felonies included the stealing of articles as different as livestock, clothing, food, money, timber, deer, fish, dogs, lead, gates, fruits, canal-banks, and ponds (Shaw 1966: 25). The novel links convicts and Maori through their experiences of Christian religious and moral reformation. The discipline of silence and confinement in prisons was broken only by Bible reading, visits with the chaplain, and repentance (Elmsley 1996: 274). Juvenile apprentices in New Zealand were required to attend church services. At the Point Puer Boys’ Establishment, each day began and ended with prayers and scripture reading. Sundays were occupied by morning and evening church services and Sunday school. The reading material for juveniles at this facility included the Bible, Common Spelling Book, the Psalter, and religious tracts (Hooper 1967: 18–19). Maori were also expected to demonstrate conversion. In the novel, the orphaned Joe is raised by his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, who is an elder of the Catholic Church, abuses him for being dark, like Joe’s grandmother. Joe explains, his grandfather was “‘secretly ashamed of my Nana and her Maoriness . . . I think he took it out on me for being like her, for being dark, and speaking Maori first, all sorts of things . . . [H]e always seemed fair about it, at least, he always gave me a reason, but he was hard on me’” (227). Discipline in Joe’s foster family enacts a colonizing narrative: the missionary converting and making penitential his “dark” wife and grandchild. However, Joe’s Nana resists this Christianizing influence and heals his childhood polio with traditional Maori medicine. Joe abandons his goal of becoming a priest. As a member of the Ratana Church, Joe’s wife Hana represents an older (1920s to 1970s) Maori political alliance with Labour. Ratana, the founder of the movement, was a Maori Christian prophet, faith healer, and miracle man born in 1876. He advocated resistance to western medicine and colonization through Christian prayer. By 1977 the movement dominated the Maori electorates from the four “winds” (as Ratana himself had predicted): the south for 45 years since 1932; the west for 42 years since 1935; the north for 39 years since 1938; and the east for 10 years since 1967. The Ratana Movement advocated a familial passing on of political power (Raureti 1992: 160), a mode of succession which the novel argues against and to which its critique of family attests. But while the novel is concerned with issues of spiritual healing, Hana’s death from influenza suggests perhaps the inefficacy of this hybrid method. Ratana Members of Parliament shared the credit for advances in Maori welfare such as Social Security and the settlement of Kai Tahu and Waikato land claims. Because these benefits persisted, the Ratana claim to have substantially lifted the Maori standard of living has been “self-perpetuating and self-justifying” (Raureti 1992: 161). Interestingly, Hulme and Holmes are both Kai Tahu. Are her land and the Tower—and the lottery money she purchases them with—a fictional metaphor for the Kai Tahu claims? Is her skeptical stance toward these welfare advances suggesting that the New Aotearoa the author

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envisions goes beyond economic gains, toward the spiritual awakening of the land? This spiritual awakening, the novel suggests, requires an awareness of the entangled histories of Maori and Pakeha as well as the cycle of familial violence that Christian penitence perpetuates in the mixed-blood family. After all, Joe’s abuse of Simon replicates his grandfather’s production of Joe as dark heathen. But, significantly, Joe realizes the religious source, the “cold and righteous intent,” of his abuse (173). Both church and prison are sites of penance and penitence. Joe’s home, site of Simon’s many beatings, is like a penitentiary, “a chilly institutional hutch” (272). An “older State house,” it lacks a domestic atmosphere, its neat lawn devoid of flowers, shrubs, or garden. An unshaded lightbulb dangles from the ceiling, the kitchen is “square and bare, almost institutional in its unadorned plainness” (76). Kere’s Tower is also a penitentiary, for when Simon asks her how she has slept, she replies, “‘Aside from the penitential part’” (38). Luce later explains to him the meaning of “penitential”: “‘That’s the penitentiary, you. So watch it” (38). The tower is a “prison” where she replays the past, her regrets about her estrangement from family, the loss of her artistic talent: But the pinnacle became an abyss, and the driving joy ended. At last there was a prison. I am encompassed by a wall, high and hard and stone, with only my brainy nails to tear it down. (7) Judith Dale notes the connection between Simon and Christian narratives of sin and redemption, arguing that Simon is a Christ-figure (1985: 421). However, in keeping with Hulme’s disagreement with this claim,25 I suggest that though Simon appears Christ-like, “like some weird saint in a stained gold window,” he is actually “a child,” a “thin shockheaded person, haloed in hair, shrouded in the dying sunlight” (16; my italics). By no means a Christ-figure, Simon is the object upon which the Christian and disciplinary narratives of abuse, penance, and penitence are enacted. He wonders at Kere’s crucifi x, “the brittle metal man . . . nailed to the wood,” the “hole in the brass chest,” how “the metal man’s fingers aren’t curled tight against the pain”: They stretch out, open and loose, still as prongs. He shivers. Why does she keep a dead man nailed on the wall? (141) These thoughts are particularly ironic considering it is Joe himself (not Simon) who compares his son to something breakable, brittle (138). Likewise, the aestheticization of suffering, the suggestion that the crucifi x is a work of art exhibited on the wall—quite indistinguishable from other artwork in Kere’s gallery-tower—contrasts painfully with the physicality of Simon’s bruised and beaten body. Kere observes:

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From the nape of his neck to his thighs, and all over the calves of his legs, he is cut and wealed. There are places on his shoulder blades where the . . . whatever you [Joe] used, you shit . . . has bitten through to the underlying bone. There are sort of blood blisters that reach round his ribs on to his chest. And an area nearly the size of [a] hand, that’s . . . infected. It’s raw and swollen and leaking infected lymph. (148) Simon’s body critiques Christian ideology’s glorification of suffering central to the economy of sin, penitence, and salvation which informs western notions of the law. His beatings are part of a ritual that creates the illusion of intimacy and familial bonding. Simon strategizes: “Get rid of the anger round the woman, stop the rift with blows, with pain, then pity, then repair, then good humour again. It works that way . . . it always did. There isn’t much time left for anything to grow anymore. It must be this place, or the break will come, and nothing will grow anymore” (192). Joe calls his beating at Kere’s hands, deserved “penance” (194), unwittingly revealing Christian ideology to be a cause of “the war.” Subsequently, Kere also feels she should carry out some form of penance. She feels “[i]t doesn’t make sense to be without any reproach”: “it’s a bloody kind of love that has violence as a silent partner . . . Penance? Strangeness? Hei, I don’t know” (196). The family, both sacred and socializing function, requires the rituals of infliction of and subjection to pain. The Holy Family takes the motley form of Simon, his father Timon Padraic (heroin addict and banished son), and Marie-Claire (a fallen nun). Shortly before Simon contemplates the crucifi x, Kerewin prays to the Virgin Mary using Marie-Claire’s rosary: “Say hello to the most gracious lady of them all, sister to tuakana sister, blessed among women, Hello Mary” (141). In terming Mary her “tuakana sister”26 (elder sister from an older branch of the family), she unknowingly refers to Simon’s mother, another no-longer virginal Mary, Marie-Claire. Later, she thinks to herself, “‘Mere-Mere quite contrary’ . . . Or is it Kere-Kere quite contrary?” (301). Hulme makes a punning wordplay on the protagonist’s name “Kere” and “kekeri” which means to “fight” or “quarrel” (Williams 1957: 114). Hana’s middle name is also revealed to be “Mere” (344). The “Holy Family,” no-longer holy, takes three forms: Marie-Claire, Timon, and Simon; Hana, Joe, and Simon; and Kere, Joe, and Simon. Each of the maternal figures becomes increasingly less Christian and less typical of the western notion of motherhood. Marie-Claire (Simon’s biological mother) leaves her cloister, Hana is a member of the hybrid Ratana Church and a reproductive figure, and Kere is even more “contrary,” for she is a non-biological (foster and later, adopted) mother to Simon and does not have sexual relations with Simon’s non-biological “father”; hence, a family that contradicts the basic sexual and reproductive premises of the nuclear family. Rather, this new model of community is based on sentiment, fostering, and adoption.27 For Simon, as for Kere and Joe, there is no salvation in either the evangelical

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or penal disciplines. By the end of the novel he has lost hearing in one ear and is barely the same person, “mainly calm and good as bread” (444). As a result of enacting these Christian narratives of law and salvation, he has been turned into the body of Christ, all the while emphasizing that he remains human, not the sacred son, but a child. “Spirals [do] make more sense than crosses, joys more than sorrows” (273).

New genealogies out of the old As we have seen, the novel’s web recapitulates Maori genealogy in which a person reenacts portions of the ancestral past. If one becomes the ancestral figure, how does one transform one’s relation to traumatic history? Here, the artist is central to re-imagining and re-weaving genealogy. But before explaining how this occurs, we must understand Kere’s modernist practice. Critics have argued that Simon’s silence undermines the synthesizing aesthetic project of Kere’s High Modernism and that Kerewin represents “an imported modernism gone fallow” (Huggan 1989; Bongie 1995).28 Indeed, Kere’s status as modernist is obvious in initial descriptions of the Tower which evoke Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar.” The poem references colonialism’s “gray and bare” “dominion” which civilizes the “slovenly wilderness”: “the Tower grew. A concrete skeleton, wooden ribs and girdle, skin of stone, grey and slateblue and heavy honey-coloured. Until one February it stood, gaunt and strange and embattled on an almost island in the shallows of an inlet, tall in Taiaroa” (7). Tropes of modernist appropriation of the exotic are evident in Kerewin’s solitary existence, her alienation from community, her collection of exotic objects, and her library. The most telling aspect of her collection of fetishes is her pounamu (greenstone) which she confesses she has bought. The only jade piece of family inheritance is a ring she gives to Joe, saying, “‘it is guaranteed pre-pakeha’” (313). She contemplates the loss of their magical powers: “They were supposed to be delight and inspiration. They turned out to be the same sort of detritus as everything else. Junk and mathoms and useless geegaws the lot of them . . . and my pounamu . . . it was beautiful to have them at first, but all the magic has worn off. Little by little it has all gone away” (314). These alienated objects are themselves symptoms of genealogical alienation, the absence of relations through which objects sustain their mana. Because of this her aesthetic practice becomes an appropriation of native-ness, not a practice arising out of the web of lived relations as a Maori. In fact, modernist solipsism results from her refusal of genealogical relations central to Enlightenment humanist notions of the self. After refusing Joe’s proposal of marriage, she attempts to preserve her unitary identity by conversing with “a mirrored me” (275). Instead, the mirror and candle only threaten the single referent self. Her memories lead her back to Joe’s fears about mirrors, his fear of finding someone else “looking back out of [his] face” (275). Kere fears she too might “see other people looking outa [her] eyes” (275). In this way, she denies her ancestors who constitute her being in the world. Later, she accidentally singes

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her hair on the candle flame, prompting her to cut her hair, a crucial detail as we will see. Her self-portrait is a fantasy of self-referentiality, the “same person staring back” (264). She gives Joe the painting saying she sees “‘better work in the mirror daily’” (264). Her refusal to reproduce, while critical of the sexual economy, also preserves her individuality. For her refusal to replicate anything except images of herself is linked in the novel to nationalist and proto-fascist desires for homogeneity and purity. As she cleans her Tower of mice, she fantasizes that the mouse traps are “baby traps” modeled after Treblinka and Dachau: “And Baby comes to play . . . once yer victim is inside, an automatic dispenser dispenses a whiff of extremely potent anaesthetic, the clear walls turn opaque, and the cell swift ly incinerates its contents. Just turn upside down afterwards, and let the clean ashes sift away” (279). The crop of mice she feeds the gulls are whole families, “from decrepit patriarch to tender pinknosed fine-furred baby” (279). In her desire for complete self-referentiality, Kere rejects both old and new genealogies. Joe’s final attempt to woo her includes a pounamu fishhook (hei matau) pendant and a plaited necklet Joe weaves from Simon’s pale-as-flax hair. Kere initially sneers at the gift (“contemporary junk”), distancing herself further from Joe and Simon (313). Both Kere’s hair-burning and her grudging acceptance of the gift are attempts to immure herself from genealogical relations. For in Maori culture hair connects people to their ancestors: “[W]hen a man talked with his ancestor-gods, their efficacy (mana atua [or spiritual godly power]) found a pathway to his body through his head, and especially his hair” (Salmond 1985: 241). This was expressed in language itself. “Uru” means the head, the hair of the head; chief; to enter or possess as a familiar spirit. “Awe” means the hair of the head about the fontanelles; essential, immortal power of atua; and strength, power, influence (241). A man’s hair was also linked literally with his descent lines, revealed in the three meanings of “kaka”: single hair, fibre stalk; stock, line, lineage; or the main lines in tattooing (241). Through his gift, Joe proposes they link genealogies through marriage. Her refusal of his proposal and her burnt hair deny the significance of genealogical relations. Kerewin’s desire to be solely herself, unique, the only referent of herself can only be fulfi lled by the eradication of difference. This, in turn, implies the “purification” attempts of the Holocaust as well as the colonization of New Zealand and Britain’s banishing across the seas of a “contaminating” criminal class. Hulme attempts to bring about an acceptance of the entangled set of relations that contact has produced in New Zealand at the same time as she advocates a new mode of belonging (not that of the nation) grounded in Maori sensibility. The novel implies that an acceptance of historically-based difference is necessary for the foundation of a new structure based not on the blood-descent of nuclear families but on the entangled oppressions wrought under empire and settler nationalism. However, this entangled history is problematic indeed when divorced from the web of lived relations through which this past takes on its everyday materiality. In the absence of these lived relations, Kere attempts to certify her authenticity as both native indigene and native Pakeha through her pounamu

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collection and her brash comments about whakapapa (genealogy). As she reads the letter explaining Simon’s past, she writes in her diary: I realised as I thunk [sic] it, that I was revelling in the knowledge of my whakapapa and solid Lancashire and Hebridean ancestry. Stout commoners on the left side, and real rangatira [chiefly class] on the right distaff side. A New Zealander through and through. Moanawhenua29 bones and heart and blood and brain. None of your (retch) import Poms or whateffers. (99) “Pom” or “pommy” denotes an Englishman (O’Grady 1965: 68).30 Kerewin’s Pakeha nativism condescends to Simon’s “Pom” status. She thinks “Ah hell, urchin, it doesn’t matter, you can’t help who your forbears were” (99). The passage also reveals the aristocratic underpinnings of Maori culture. Rangatira rank, according to Sir Peter Buck, was typically passed down by primogeniture, and “purity of descent was jealously guarded by selection in marriage” (1962: 337–38). Commoner status, ware or tūtūa, was the result of younger siblings who could not inherit the rangatira rank of their parents: the descendants of the junior families who intermarried with other junior families drifted farther away from the prospects of exercising chieftainship and thereby passed out of the chiefly class. One of the means by which a commoner could rise to chiefly status would be through marriage to a member of the senior branch. As a result, many tūtūa left to found their own sub-tribe or tribe, the only other means to avoid passing out of the chiefly class. Junior family members would then form the nucleus of a new sub-tribe or migrate to a new land where the process of tribal development would commence all over again (338). This is, in effect, what Kere and Joe do, for although Kere rebuilds the Maori hall at Moerangi, she chooses to dwell near Taiaroa; and while Joe inherits Tiaki Mira’s land, he also brings the mauri with him to Taiaroa where it is taken into the earth again, thus signifying his founding of a new home. Kere’s uneasiness with her genealogy lies in its status as a document that attempts to deny the actuality of estrangement. When she meets Joe’s drinking friends, she greets them in Maori thinking, she “wants to whip out a certified copy of her whakapapa, preferably with illustrative photographs (most of her [relatives] on her mother’s side are more Maori-looking than she is). ‘Look! I am really one of you,’ she could say. ‘Well, at least some of me is’” (112). The need to show written and photographic proof of her lineage suggests an anxiety to authenticate herself, to quantify her Maori-Scottish blood, and in this context of Joe’s Maori friends, to discount the “stout Lancashire and Hebridean ancestry” (99). In usage whakapapa means both a “genealogical table” and the practice of reciting genealogies and legends (Williams 1957: 41). Interestingly, her use of the term is in its more rigid and western form, a genealogical table, and evokes less the flexible, multiple relations that the second meaning implies. Salmond describes the non-linear and web-like structure as well as the flexibility and multiple claims to ancestry practiced in genealogical recounting. When

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Cook landed in Poverty Bay in 1769, the ancestors of what would become the Ngaati Kahungunu (Joe’s tribe) separated off from the Tuuranga-nui. Despite their disputes over mana and local resources, they maintained their genealogical connections: “Through all of these ancestors the people of Tuuranga-nui were linked with many other places in an intricate web of kinship, where lives could be traced back to common progenitors through male or female forbears for any one of a number of reasons—to claim relationship, seniority, alliance, access to particular resources, residence or the right to travel and trade safely, without fear of attack” (1991: 122). Kere’s adoption of Simon—like the Tainui’s informal fostering of the boy—suggests that whanau, whakapapa, and belonging are perhaps much less reliant on blood descent. Hulme remarks on the divided-ness of being both Pakeha and Maori: The pain is quite simply expressed—you never truly belong to one side or the other—as a person who is intrinsically a mongrel you can never be fully committed to one way alone. Now I’ll throw again and again to my Maori side, but there is no way honestly I can say that I will totally ignore or exclude, or even want to exclude, all the joys and benefits of the Pakeha side of things . . . [T]he joy is being able to be on both sides of the fence . . . to have more than one set of ears, to have more than one set of eyes. It makes you sometimes feel duplicitous and betraying of one side or the other. (1990: 3–4) The novel explores this complex double-ness and imagines other forms of belonging that go beyond the assumption of sameness, forms which can accommodate the complex interrelations brought about by contact. For even as the characters are influenced by their ancestral pasts, it is precisely through transformative, lived relations that a hopeful future emerges. Aesthetic practice is central to transforming one’s relation to the past. After he inherits the land, Joe finds new purpose in carving (whakairo). He carves the rahui31 (boundary markers), each representing important members of the new whanau, nodes in the web of genealogy (383). Simon’s singing talent also emerges through his relation to others. Kere witnesses his song of mourning for a dead mollyhawk: “It is a thin reedy sound at first, nasal and highpitched. It is the only sound he can make voluntarily . . . and it is as secret as his name” (236). When he realizes Kere has heard him, he jerks spasmodically, “fighting against the horror” (236). Nothing happens, and he realizes he can sing and that Kere has heard him. It is precisely through Simon’s relation to Kere that he works through some of his traumatic past. Kere functions as witness, not only affirming the event but also becoming part of its inscription: “The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to—and heard—is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event

120 “Fostering” a new vision of Maori community comes to be inscribed for the first time” (Laub 1992: 57). The witness, then, is the canvas on which the experience is recorded. However, the novel problematizes the psychoanalytic cure for trauma even while invoking it. Simon’s muteness prevents the “talking cure” from taking place and challenges the very process of working-through, the witness’s listening through the “black hole” in memory. The narration of the event that constitutes the traumatic kernel never occurs. Rather than a single traumatic kernel, one glimpses portions of Simon’s many ancestral pasts. Nevertheless, Kerewin’s constitutive role as witness to Simon’s singing enacts the kind of alternative aesthetic practice crucial to imagining the new form of belonging. This new aesthetic practice—which produces the “[n]ew marae from the old marae, a beginning from the end” (3)—includes Joe’s rahui, Simon’s message (“Clare was he”), and Kere’s terracotta sculpture. The tricephalos sculpture— whose image adorns the cover of the novel’s first printings—refigures the three individuals as part of a new entity in a particularly Maori way: “The hair of their heads is entwined at the top in a series of spirals. Simon’s hair curves back from his neck to link Kerewin and Joe to him” (315). Not only does the sculpture link the three spiritually and genealogically through their hair, it does so through the design of the spiral (taka) which itself indicates descent in wharenui ancestral carvings. According to D. R. Simmons, a single spiral indicates a female line of descent, and a double spiral (two elements which interlock at the center) indicates a male line (1997: 37). Kere’s tricephalos recognizes Joe’s attempt to weave a connection to her literally via Simon’s hair and Joe’s skill as a weaver of flax. She creates an alternative genealogy that links the three spiritually out of the ruins of the Tower. Likewise, Kere’s new home, built around the decapitated Tower, is spiral-shaped, allowing for privacy amid the connected wholeness of the new whanau (434). The building manifests other meanings of taka which include to be “completely encircled” and “on all sides, round” (Williams 1957: 366). Among her “seven new directions”—“taka” also indicate changes in direction—is rebuilding the wharenui at Moerangi and reconnecting with her whanau, “tying up loose ends, making the [genealogical] net whole” (436). Simon himself embodies two other genealogies which the novel weaves together, the Celtic child-guest and the mythic Maui. According to Hulme herself, Simon derives from the Celtic tradition of the “marvellous stranger” or “marvellous child,” for example Aifa and Cuchulain’s son Connla or Arianrhod’s child Dylan (Dale 1985: 427–28, ff. 13). Hulme has recently pointed out the relevance of Celtic myth: “But, I assumed everybody would pick up on the Celtic references. I’m from the South and a lot of Celts live here on the [West] Coast and in Dunedin. But, no, no, nobody did—so I made a point of talking about it!”32 The stories of the Mabinogion as well as other Celtic legends and those of Maui are genealogical traditions passed down orally and later transcribed into written form. Kerewin re-weaves these heroic genealogies while also transforming them to reflect Simon’s ancestry: the founding Arthur becomes an invading colonizer, while Maui fishes up the entangled Pakeha and Maori genealogies.

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Dismantling discourses: psychoanalysis, history, and the novel So far I have showed how the traumatic past of nineteenth-century contact re-emerges through genealogy and even how this lived web transforms the damaging past. But the novel’s traumatic realism offers much more: a decolonizing critique of discursive structures which attempt to narrate the traumatic past as well as an alternative mode for living with this past. Kere’s search for a whole, causal, and rational explanation for Simon’s past occupies much of the novel. Early on she compares him to a “mystery” (94) and herself to Sherlock Holmes: “So. We take up an old cold trail—what clues do we have, Sherlock? . . . A rosary and a ring. A dead boat in deep water, and two dead people. An inarticulate child, a tongue-locked mind” (94–95). She investigates each object. The ring she traces to a “doddering Irish earl,” the rosary to Europe, concluding—after the jeweler, the police, the library, hospital records, even the local—“it was a dead end” (97). The author herself emphasizes this failure of investigation. In a short story “A Drift in Dream” (published three years after the novel), Hulme reveals that Marie-Claire, Simon’s biological mother, died in a car crash before the boatwreck. The drowned woman who possessed the rosary and ring, then, could not have been Marie-Claire. In this way, the novel is an anti-detective-novel, one which frustrates western humanist notions of the (male) subject, specifically the positivist and inductive method that grounds science, the belief that discontinuous facts can point to an explanation of a mystery (Spanos 1972: 150). Refusing to function as a marker of identity, the rosary instead produces relationships. It functions as a “transitional object,” a prop that allows a child to experience controlled periods of loss toward eventual survival of the mother’s death (Santner 1990: 21). The rosary stands in for Simon’s missing mother. Once she returns in the forms of Hana Mere and Kerewin, he loses his compulsion to possess it and uses it instead to secure a connection with a substitute. Simon’s many traumatic symptoms, like his sketchy past, remain only partially explained; and we can only speculate as to their causes.33 His instinctive hand block (37) we might guess to be a result of his abusive experiences with Joe which the novel details. His terrified reaction to Kere’s pidgin French and Citroen cars can be inferred from his French connection, the inscription on the rosary “M. C. de V.” The explanation of this detail is found only in Hulme’s “A Drift in Dream” which reveals that “M. C. de V.” are the initials of Simon’s biological mother, Marie-Claire de Vraiencourt. His fear of water and the ocean, his thoughts that “the smell of the sea was the smell of blood” (111), might be caused by the boatwreck or the shark attack on Dunedin beach (87). His silence might be a historical residue of nineteenth-century prison culture. His fear of needles can be linked to his father Timon’s heroin addiction, confirmed by the boat’s contents (436). Simon also has dreams of being kept for days in a small compartment and given doses of a drug: He can feel the wire round his wrists again. There isn’t any room to move, and there isn’t enough air to breathe, and the voice, rich warm powerful

122 “Fostering” a new vision of Maori community voice is questioning, questions he can never answer, and laughing when he struggles. The voice grows and echoes, and the pain intensifies, and he tries to cry out against it, but no sound comes. A bitter sting in his arm, and then the fingers bite him, pushing into places where it hurts worst, and sending him down into the blackness where he cannot breathe. The lid closes over against his silent screaming. (203–4) This passage is a description of Simon’s dream, an unconscious re-experiencing of trauma. Kere, however, is not privy to this last explanation. Nor is she privy to the explanation of Simon’s fear of matches and fire explained in “A Drift.” And there are other unexplained markings on Simon’s body that predate Joe’s beatings (173). Joe explains the unconscious nature of Simon’s trauma: “‘I think he tries to give you answers . . . I don’t think he can remember much anyway, and it all seems to have been bad . . . Anyway, if you persist, he’ll have nightmares the next time he sleeps’” (222). After Simon’s supposed—only partial—working through of his fear of the ocean, needles, and hooks, he does have nightmares. The noise he makes “is full of abject fear, of someone driven to the point where only terror and anguish exist. Nothing else, not even a memory” (224). The revelation of the traumatic kernel(s), then, can only occur by endangering the patient. Thus, Kere’s wish to give Simon a shield against the dread unknown of his nightmares is revealed as a kind of will to construct a causal and developmental narrative, one which might allow Simon to grow up “normal.” This teleology threatens what little peace Simon can find in the present. The novel juxtaposes a detailed narrative of the present with an only partially recoverable past. Moreover, even the inferred relations between symptom and cause are only inferences of general description, for example that Simon must have been to France and had some sort of experience with Citroen cars or that he must have observed his father’s arsonist tendencies. The actual making conscious of the event through verbalized memory is never enacted in the novel, and Simon’s muteness, which itself seems to be a traumatic symptom, prevents the actual narration of the kernel into memory. As in Holt’s Waimea Summer, trauma is shown to be the limit case of psychoanalysis. And the absence of a cure for or even praxis for living with trauma is the means by which Hulme undermines the claims of psychoanalysis as well as the claims of the Bildungsroman and its narrative of “correct” socialization. The novel further critiques historical disclosure—the revelation of Simon’s personal history via psychoanalytic narratives—in the figure of Kerewin. Her desire to understand Simon’s past is presented as an intrusive form of “counter-transference,” a reversal of the usual manner in which transference occurs. Instead of the patient projecting unconscious and repressed impulses onto the analyst who then attempts to read the patient’s underlying preoccupations, in “counter-transference” the analyst projects his/her unconscious impulses onto the patient’s situation in order to provide a causal explanation for the problem.

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In historical terms counter-transference denotes a situation in which a historical event or text provokes a perceptible unconscious reaction in the historian himself (Friedlander 1978: 18). The closed system of psychoanalysis testifies to the unconscious tendencies of the observer. In psychoanalysis counter-transference refers to “[t]he whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand—especially to the analysand’s own transference” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 92). In interpreting the patient’s symptoms, the analyst is guided by his own unconscious reactions and emotions such that resonance from unconscious to unconscious becomes the only authentically psychoanalytic form of communication (93). Counter-transference is closely related to what Freud termed “suspended” or “poised attention” (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) which involves the analyst’s attentiveness to all material, including any that seems to contradict or have no place in his/her expectations (LaCapra 1989). Through “poised attention,” the analyst uncovers the unconscious connections and bears in mind multiple apparently insignificant elements whose correlations emerge only later on. Poised attention challenges usual scientific notions of objectivity in that it is the only true “objective attitude” suited to an essentially “distorted object” (LaPlanche and Pontalis 1973: 44). The problem of counter-transference appears in Kere’s motivation to unearth Simon’s past. She writes in her diary: “So why not try and find out who he is? I could kill a bird or two thereby: give Sim an understanding of his dark past, that shield against the dread unknown in nightmares he needs” (94; my italics). In this way, she rationalizes her own Holmesian curiosity to “solve the riddle” and provide the “shield” or interpretation. The “dread unknown” refers to the terrible truth about Simon’s past, specifically that it remains shadowy and only partially knowable. By the novel’s end, Simon’s traumatic acting out only seems to have ended—and his trauma supposedly to have healed—because he is too damaged to act out! Her own curiosity is rationalized away in exchange for her self-image as child psychologist: “I have a purpose in life again!” (99). Kere’s role as child psychologist suggests the linear progression of normative psychic development upon which the pathologizing discourse of psychology is premised as well as the linear “progress” implied in colonialism and its discourse of modernization. Simon’s traumatized psyche and disabled body at the end of the novel prevent psychological disclosure and prevent the logic of “normal” child development as well as the logic of modernization from perpetuating itself. Because of Simon’s youth and muteness, counter-transference takes on a predatory quality, especially since he is unable to voice any of his dreams or traumatic experiences; the shield Kerewin wishes to provide, then, is revealed to be unverifiable and perhaps even motivated by her own desires. Indeed, the desire for complete disclosure central to the western humanist subject can be fulfi lled only through objectification and violence. The “understanding” that she hopes to piece together is recorded, appropriately, in her diary, the perfect mirror reflection. Significantly, the burning of the diary toward the end of the novel marks her transformation. While complete disclosure is not possible, the shards and fragments of nineteenth-century boy convict transportation provide a shadowy context for

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understanding Simon’s particular symptoms. It is precisely through ancestry and genealogy that these marginal fragments emerge, not in the delineated, recorded past-ness of history but in the shadowy, gapped, incomplete but entirely embodied and lived present, a present which bars even literate discourse itself. In traumatic realism the contemporary web of lived relations is the site out of which the disavowed aspects of ongoing colonization emerge, and they continue to re-emerge precisely because the new community of Hulme’s novel must be imagined in relation to the Pakeha state which is heir to the legacy of British delegitimation of Maori sovereignty and repudiation of its own criminal class. Hulme’s critique of psychoanalysis which cannot provide a cure or praxis for living with the past, in effect, calls for a transformation of contemporary sociopolitical relations between Maori and Pakeha which will also thereby radically refigure one’s relation to that past. What her novel proposes, then, is not the traditional cure for trauma, a working through of the past, but rather a change in one’s relation to it via a renegotiation of relations between Maori and Pakeha. This renegotiation requires the recognition of the entangled cultures and genealogies of both parties and of Maori as a foundational partner. The novel further undermines the authority of both settler and native history. As we saw above, the suppressed history of criminals and popular movements is confined to a dark corner of imperial and settler nationalist history. The narrative shape of national history, one of increasing emergence, growth, and rationality, is produced through excision, when the state or the historian who occupies the site of the dominant center “performs a cutting operation: remembering / furthering that which it deems meaningful for its concept of development, and forgetting / suppressing the dissonant, disorderly, irrational, archaic, and subversive” (Ileto 1988: 154). While settler and imperial history exclude the history of criminals and so-called enemies of the state, Maori are confined to limited notions of authenticity and tradition. Chris Bongie argues that the novel fictively reconstructs a lost origin, all the while acknowledging its “unreality and inadequacy” (1995: 232). Joe’s longing for Hana represents a reinvocation of tradition from the distance created by mourning (239).34 However, Joe’s dream actually reflects an initial melancholic inability to mourn for the passing of Hana and the old ways. Joe’s alcoholism and his love-hatred for himself and especially for Simon are symptoms of this melancholia arising after Hana’s death. He thinks to himself, “I loved him [Simon] too hard, hated him too much” (381). He blames Simon for his family’s demise. In a metaphorical replaying of the fatal-impact narrative, Hana and Timote die of influenza just after Simon, the “import Pom,” arrives. When he and Timote feed at Hana’s breasts, her “milk is sweeter than the riverwater,” but when Simon joins them, she begins to die: “as the boy begins to drink, Hana’s face changes. Her skin goes grey and begins to run with sweat.” Joe discovers he is “sucking the fat furred end of an enormous moth” (351). He is unable to accept that he has failed Hana by losing Simon (353). Bongie’s reading ignores how the novel undermines a unitary notion of origin. For what is crucial about Joe’s dreams of Hana is that she turns into many moths, “whirling clouds of fire-eyed moths”

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(352). Though Tiaki Mira explains Maori views on death, his disjointed examples offer little by way of explanation of Joe’s dream. The one link between the stories, however, is the multiple nature of Hana’s transformation into moths and the multiple explanations for death. Tiaki Mira provides three versions of the afterlife. The first version is an allegory of a journey of “becoming less human.” It involves a second death and the dwelling in increasingly more unpleasant parts of the underworld whereupon one either becomes nothing or returns to earth as a moth: “‘When the moth dies, that’s you gone forever’” (354). The second version involves a journey along “the sea path,” a journey westward, and a judgment that places one in heaven or hell. Mira insists that this one is “cribbed,” too Christian. The third involves choosing between an earthly journey to Papa (earth mother) or a heavenly one to Rangi (sky father) (354). Like Hana’s transformation into many moths, his account of these multiple stories of the afterlife, replete with their many choices, suggests the multiplicity within Maori tradition itself, a tradition which, Mira points out, is also influenced by European culture and religion. In The Coming of the Maori, Sir Peter Buck remarks on the variety within Maori culture, physical characteristics, and language. Maori resemble a Polynesian archipelago due to the different ancestral canoes whose cultures “differ as much as the individual islands in a Polynesian group” (1962: 2). M. P. K. Sorrenson notes that the term “Maori” itself has not always existed in the way it is used today; there is “no one typical Maori but many Maoris; no one Maori culture but regional and tribal varieties of culture” (1993: 59). The term “Maori” which means literally “ordinary” was first recorded around 1800 and used as an adjective in the phrase tangata maori, an “ordinary person,” as contrasted with tangata tupua, a supernatural being as the Europeans were first thought to be (59).35 By the 1830s the term came into occasional use as a proper noun but did not come into general use until the 1860s (59). Belich describes a transformation of relations between Maori tribes that was a result of European encroachment. During the mid-nineteenth-century Land Wars, pan-tribal movements such as the Kai Ngarara and the Maori King movement developed due to the necessity of fighting against British troops who sought to subdue the North Island tribes (1996: 229–30). Further, while it may be true that the ancestors of those termed today “Maori” migrated from the eastern Pacific, the Great Fleet migration of seven canoes is a construction of Pakeha ethnographers which Maori culture has transformed into a living legend. At hui or tribal gatherings throughout New Zealand, “the Great Fleet lives on”: “Thus have the myths that Pakehas made become Maori property” (Sorrenson 1993: 55–56, 86). In this way, Hulme’s text destabilizes not only the claims of the presumed cultural authenticity of native tradition(s) but also those of the authority of ethnography in documenting culture. The novel questions any claim for a unitary, authentic Maori-ness. The mauri which embodies the spirit of the land is of cloudy origin and seems to hold, not—as is usually the case in anthropological accounts—the spirit of the dwelling place of a founding canoe and therefore a particular iwi, but the spirit of all

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of Aotearoa. After Tiaki’s death, Joe corresponds with North Island elders and libraries, “trying to find out . . . what one of the founding canoes could be buried here. Whether there was any ancient lore concerning a pact with such a nebulous entity as the mauri of Aotearoa and any tribe of the old people” (382). The actual reality and authenticity of the mauri is further cast into doubt, as Joe wonders whether he has dreamed it all (384). Joe’s encounter with Tiaki Mira36 is, on the one hand, fraught with myths, contradictions, multiple explanations, and on the other, replete with the undeniable nature of certain events. Even though Joe may believe that his experience has been all a dream, the undeniability of the mauri and its effects remain: “It’s a hump in the dusk, a round, a disk, a thing the size he could hold in his two spread palms. Settled on a broken-backed rock, balanced on the crack as though it had grown there. It looks very black or very green, and from the piercing, the hole in the centre, light like a glow-worm, aboriginal light” (384). Other “magical” events include Mira’s stick prophecy which encourages him to seek out Joe, the broken man; the exact choreography of events during Tiaki’s last days; his supernatural “signing” of his will; Joe’s dream of Hana which is echoed by the moth-visit to Kerewin; and the wairua who heals Kere from cancer. Hulme describes a wairua as “not totally human things [sic]” who help us without our knowing it (142). Kere’s mysterious helper and Joe’s kaumatua are both wairua, “bone people,”37 the new tūpuna for the alternative community the novel envisions. Thus, while the reader recognizes these “magical” events as authentic and authenticating, she also questions their believability. The very origins of the new community are rendered as possibly inauthentic. The novel’s critique of authenticity is, in some ways, a rarely noted aspect of its controversial reception. In 1985, Pakeha critic C. K. Stead argued that Hulme’s evocation of Maori culture was “unconvincing,” “willed,” “self-conscious,” “not inevitable,” and “not entirely authentic” (104). Stead’s desire to view Maori-ness within constrained limits extended even to pedigree and blood quantum. In his controversial essay, Stead argued that Hulme should not have been awarded the Pegasus Prize for Maori Literature because not only was her use of Maori culture unconvincing but Hulme is also only one-eighth Maori. Stead’s wish to contain Maori within a “traditional” past prevents him from seeing that Hulme is engaging in a work of fiction heavily influenced by her predilection for fantasy and science fiction. The more fantastical elements of The Bone People suggest not only Hulme’s critique of the impulse to authenticity itself but also the role of visionary imaginings—via genealogy—in creating a new future out of a destructive past. But while the novel subverts historical and anthropological notions of unitary origins, it also undermines discursive authority by critiquing as constructed the developmental narratives of history and psychoanalysis. The progression from “savage” to “civilized,” pre-capitalist to capitalist, from provincial to modern, leads only to dissolution and backwardness. Kerewin’s fantasies of complete disclosure and correct development are represented in her individualistic and solipsistic diary. In order to bring about the transformation from modernist alienation toward alternative community, the novel dispenses with the humanist

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subject’s self-centered drive for explanation, knowledge, and progress recorded in the diary. In other words, if the diary has been the repository of Kere’s fantasies of rational investigation (as Sherlock Holmes) and her fantasy of psychoanalytic explanations, the burning of the diary destroys the causal, rational, and linear structures of history and psychoanalysis. The diary, in its solipsism and selfabsorption, not only records her desire to narrativize Simon, it produces this narrative by performing the presumption of psychoanalytic counter-transference, by producing only the narrative it desires to discover: Kerewin’s fantasies of a linear, causal narrative of Simon’s trauma, his healing, and unproblematic growth into adulthood. All of these desires are disappointed by the novel’s end. The act of burning the diary signifies, then, Kerewin’s willingness to part not only with the constructed, positivist narratives of history and psychoanalysis—along with her broad knowledge contained in the diary—but also with her desire for causal, linear trajectories. The diary’s destruction also frustrates the reader’s investment in the authenticating role of scriptural knowledge. Once the diary is burned, the reader is forced to question the veracity of everything she has read. If there is no original text of the diary, where is the literate, evidentiary, authenticating basis for the events described? And, whose narrative voice links the disparate thoughts, speech, and descriptive prose of the novel? The burning of the diary undermines the author-ity of the authorial and narrative voice, and in so doing undermines the novel as not only the physical embodiment of that voice but also its authority to construct the narrative itself. Thus, the diary’s burning signifies an end to the particular way in which Kere’s literate voice has dominated the telling. For the narrative perspective in the epilogue is difficult to place and shifts between a few first-person references to Joe as speaker, third-person narration, and even screenplay dialogue. In a sense, the act marks an end to her pretentious authority, to the “[p]retentious bugger” she terms this mirror, and to her alienation from community (430). It marks her return to her social role. But the new community is not completely traditional, “[n]ot family, not whanau,” a kind of community for which “there aren’t words . . . yet” (395). In this way Hulme’s text is much more optimistic than the apocalyptic magic realism of García Márquez or Rushdie in that it attempts to envision the beginnings of a non-biological, non-spousal community and its acknowledgment of multiple origins. Even further, the novel and its role in producing the structures of feeling of the nation are revealed as relying on the private acts of reading and writing, a kind of alienation that theories of the nation as “imagined community” deceptively efface. In the author’s “Preface to the first edition” subtitled “Standards in a non-standard book,” Hulme insists on the non-normative characteristics which led many publishers to turn down her book: “it was too large, too unwieldy, too different when compared with the normal shape of a novel.” She advises the reader: “To those used to one standard, this book may offer a taste passing strange, like the original mouthful of kina [sea urchin] roe. Persist. Kina can become a favorite food.” Her emphasis on maintaining her choices as to the shape of the work and the “shape of words” is followed by what she

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terms an “explanatory dream,” all of which point to the ways in which Hulme is deliberately writing against the formal, linguistic conventions of the novel. The interpretation of the dream itself relies on understanding the inadequacies of translating oral-based language into written form. The “I” in the dream, sitting in a railway carriage, passes some mountains and says aloud, “Hey! These must be the Rimatakas,” a statement which is suspiciously confirmed by an inscription across the mountains themselves, “Rimutakas 10,000 feet high.” The inscription, like many of Hulme’s entries (and absent entries) in the deceptive “Translation of Maori Words and Phrases” at the end of the novel, differs from the spoken name by a single italicized vowel, an inaccuracy in translating the oral form that constitutes a change in meaning altogether. “Taka”—the spiral pattern in Maori carving as well as a change in direction—evokes the new hope and belonging articulated in the “Prologue.” “Rima” signifies the number five in Maori, while “rimu” refers to mildew, moss, or seaweed. The oral refers to five changes in direction, five spirals, each of which perhaps refer to the five sections of the novel (Season of the Day Moon, The Sea Round, The Lightning Struck Tower, Feldapart Sinews, Breaken Bones, and the Epilogue), while the latter makes an ambiguous reference to spirals of mildew, moss, or seaweed. Simultaneously, if the inscription “Rimutaka” signifies an inadequate translation, it also produces a transformation of the railway carriage, previously “openwindowed,” into an exclusive squash club, suggesting the ways in which translation into the literate has produced the novel form as an elite club based upon exclusions of privilege, wealth, and western education. The poorly dressed speaker/author attempts entrance by purchasing a membership with a defunct credit card, anticipating she will be rejected. She is pleasantly surprised when the attendant returns with beer for her and her friend and the club is transformed once again into a train. The dream is a kind of allegory for her own project which has gained entrance into the elite club of novelists, but as it were, by the back door, precisely by refusing the standards of the novel and instead not only enacting a transformation of those standards but doing so precisely because the literate standard cannot accommodate the oral traditions and the traumatic genealogies of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Throughout the early chapters of the novel, Kere’s literacy, her highly cultured and worldly use of language condescend to Simon’s youthful vocabulary, his ease in communicating via sound, music, touch, gestures, and emotion. He is bewildered by her “multisyllables” which go “straight in one ear and out the other, leaving behind an increasing residue of strange sounds” (38). In their early interactions, Kere’s use of words is compared to “a fine drawn duel” on unequal terrain, Kere’s words against his miming (31). Simon’s reliance on physicality and touch almost undoes the distancing effect of Kere’s words: “But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk” (71). Likewise, Simon’s “wordless mouth music” (240) and his rendering of words into mere sound reveal the way in which sound—not language—becomes a mode of coping with his traumatic past. If the novel’s characters destabilize the importance of the literate, the fi ft h

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and final “taka” radically refigures the “normal shape” of the novel. The epilogue “Moonwater Picking” is a poetic, oral text—entirely antithetical to the more traditional narrative voice in the novel—and is in keeping with the newly constituted lived relations. The presence of “orality” in de Certeau’s sense—dialogue, speech, laughter, sounds, and music—as well as the emphasis on physical closeness and bodiliness are crucial differences. They reflect the kind of immediacy and intimacy of these new relations: Two wrinkled old bodies, Kerewin’s greatgreat aunts, cossetted together full of mothmirth and dry seedy shadows of laughter. Knocking each other’s ribs with sharp elbows, plucking at one another with bony fingers, flickering from flame of dirty memory to flame of dirty joke. “So I sol’ mesel’ soul an’ arse‘ol, an’ never did regret it,” husk husk croak croak tee hee hee. He inclines his head to them. Two people, pulsing by themselves in a darkish corner. (441) Ironically, here, in this new language and set of relations, Kere’s great-great-aunts are able to find humor in the commodification of sexual relations. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the novel should end with this language which is beyond scriptural structures because this new community requires not only the dismantling of the literate forms which have produced the nation but also a new mode of telling which is more precisely that of the oral tradition. For the existence of the “book” and of the diary signify the absence of intimately lived relations which are produced by and which perpetuate the oral. The new community that Hulme posits attempts to find a path between the Pakeha nation-state and its exclusionary and oppressive tactics, on the one hand, and a Maori nationalism which promotes a logic of “purity,” descent, and blood quantum. The novel’s elaboration of genealogy undermines both the exclusive historical claims of settler nationalism and Maori valuation of chiefly lineage. But perhaps more significantly, genealogy itself proves to be the means by which lived relations in the present can transform one’s relation to the destructive past and thereby produce new possible futures.

4

“Talking in circles” Disrupting the logic of property in Gary Pak’s The Watcher of Waipuna

U.S. imperialism has been recently characterized alternatively as a “liberal empire,” as imperialism without colonialism, and as an “empire of bases” (Purdy 2003; Abdel-Malek 1981; Johnson 2004). In each of these paradigms, neoliberalism proclaims free markets, democracy, and increasingly individualistic social orders the best model for all. Anything but Hardt and Negri’s boundariless and centerless empire, recent events have baldly shown what those in U.S. colonies have experienced for more than the past two centuries, namely that U.S. empire is alive and well. Indeed, the U.S. and its key allies Japan and Britain have sought the maximization of short-term financial profitability through the use of military force. Resistance to this “new” imperialism, Samir Amin explains, depends upon the ability of people “to liberate themselves from liberal illusions” (2004: 82). The recent display of U.S. power is not “new” so much as a more muscular version of its former self, one that builds upon its early territorial acquisitions. For if one thing is certain, the U.S. rarely relinquishes its military outposts, preferring instead to disguise its imperial reach through a variety of seemingly provisional categories from territories (Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa), free associations (Federated States of Micronesia), occupied nations (Japan and Germany), incorporated states (Hawai‘i), neocolonial sites (the Philippines), to the recent informal lease agreements that produce a shifting, protean net of bases that rings the world. The annexation of Hawai‘i in 1898 demonstrates how this new form echoes its former self, drawing upon U.S. naval power to enforce the overthrow of a sovereign monarchy in the interests of private plantations and its own military. Along with the acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, and American Samoa, the annexation of Hawai‘i cinched U.S. military control in the Pacific and Asia with the establishment of CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific) or PACOM (Pacific Command) which today complements other regional commands in Europe (EUCOM), the Middle East (CENTCOM), and Latin America (SOUTHCOM). Hawaii’s white oligarchy of planters and businessmen enriched themselves and worked in concert with the U.S. military, continuing to rule until 1954 when the Democratic Party—led by an interethnic labor movement of plantation laborers and longshoremen, members of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU)—ousted the ruling Republicans. Statehood

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in 1959, however, was premised upon the U.S.’s secret and unilateral removal of Hawai‘i (and American Samoa) from the United Nations decolonizing List of Non-Self-Governing Territories. The nisei1-led Democratic Party, seeking to address the social inequities in the islands, increased taxes on large landholders and initiated the first statewide land use law in the nation. But, they were unable to legislate changes in land ownership by the major plantation companies, the Big Five. Instead, they chose land development as a means toward broad socioeconomic reform, leading to unprecedented increases in land and housing prices that fueled speculation and a volatile real estate market. The resulting high cost of living and Hawaii’s dependence on tourism have forced many to leave the islands for the continent. By the early 1970s local communities throughout the islands began objecting to their eviction and dispossession by developers. In Halawa Valley, tenants protested the building of Aloha stadium; Filipinos in Ota Camp were evicted so that private apartments could be built for military tenants; small farmers in Makaha rose up against developer Chinn Ho who sought to build a four-lane highway on Hawaiian Homes land; residents and small farmers in Napo‘opo‘oHonaunau in South Kona organized against Bishop Estate who sought to replace agricultural land with a county golf course; and residents protested in Nukoli‘i, Kaua‘i the plan of a Japanese company, Hasegawa Komuten, to build resort and residential units. Gary Pak’s collection, The Watcher of Waipuna, invokes these struggles to varying degrees, but perhaps most significantly the widely publicized occupations of Kalama and Waiāhole-Waikāne Valleys. Both were crucial in articulating the emergence of a local movement out of which the Kānaka Maoli sovereignty movement re-emerged. Pak himself was a participant in some of these struggles, including that of Waiāhole-Waikāne.2 The collection’s title story, “The Watcher of Waipuna,” tells of a community’s opposition to a U.S.–Japan partnership, Hawaiian International Corporation (HIC), and its plan to build a hotel resort on 76 acres of undeveloped land in Waipuna. In order to gain the crucial 5 acres of beach-front land, the company offers a part-Hawaiian Vietnam veteran, Gilbert Sanchez, three quarters of a million dollars for land which has been in his family for generations. At the urging of HIC and their lawyer James Fogarty, his sisters Lola and Lucy try to “persuade” the illiterate Gilbert to sign away his rights to the land. The sisters construct Gilbert’s incompetence, circulating rumors of his “insanity,” what psychologists call a multiple personality disorder. Gilbert forms a brief alliance with old man Nakakura who is also deemed crazy for his attempts to ward off invasion of Waipuna by imaginary “frogmen.” Upon his death, Nakakura names Gilbert the next “Watcher.” Lucy has a change of heart, and along with others, helps Gilbert to oppose HIC through mysterious acts of sabotage. “Watcher” references alternative newspaper accounts of local struggles through the magic realist device of parody, an aesthetic strategy which links these struggles to other locations touched by globalization. But Pak’s critique goes much deeper, getting to the heart of magic realism, its exposure of the liberal illusion that spurs on both empire and neocolonial relations under globalization. The law, its support

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of property and liberal individualism, is key here. Gilbert’s multiple personalities and his penchant for pidgin’s orality provide the means to disrupt the liberal assumptions which tempt the community to betray their own futures.

Class alliances against development: Kalama and Waiāhole-Waikāne On May 11, 1971 after almost a month of delaying eviction, 32 locals were arrested in Kalama Valley. The Bishop Estate, which had leased land to tenants and farmers for years, evicted pig farmer George Santos and others in order to build a golf course and high-income subdivision (which actually sits oppressively and anachronistically across from Sandy Beach today). Kalama Valley became what Huli, the organ for the activist group Kōkua Hawai‘i, would call the “headquarters of the Local Movement” (Huli May 1971: 3). In its inaugural issue, Huli declared Kalama a victory for local people: “For the first time a lot of us began to realize what it is to be Local and to be proud of it. What it feels to be brown and proud” (Huli May 1971: 3). Defining Kalama as “a coming together” of locals— “Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, and Samoan”—the anti-eviction action was an attempt to ally these ethnic groups against big landowners and developers who were building homes for wealthy mainland haole (foreigners, often white Americans). Huli stated: We realized that the time is gone when we could afford to fight among ourselves because of the haoles. The time is here when we have to put the big landowners and developers in their place. They are people like us. They do not have the right to kick us off our land to build homes and hotels for the mainland haole. They do not have the right to control all of our jobs and our lives. In Kalama Valley we learned that we can beat them if we stick together. (Huli May 1971: 3) As veteran organizer John J. Witeck states, Kalama showed the lie within the “benevolence” of development and signified “the dawn” of many community struggles as well as “the militant birth pains of the Kānaka Maoli movement” (Witeck 1999: 15). Haunani-Kay Trask argues that the radicalization of Kōkua Hawai‘i “was a portent of things to come, especially in the Hawaiian community” in that the successes of other struggles such as Waiāhole-Waikāne and Kaho‘olawe were the result of “lessons learned and the questions raised” then about discipline, organization, and urbanization (1987: 146). But, as Trask acknowledges, in the early stages Kōkua Hawai‘i members did not distinguish between Hawaiians and other locals; rather, the difference between locals and haole was more strongly felt. Not until the late 1970s did many Hawaiians begin to differentiate themselves as “natives” (146). Though she claims Kalama Valley as the birth of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, Trask largely ignores the transformative process, the distinctions between local and native that have proven to be an obstacle to the decolonizing project.

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The complexity of the local lies at the heart of decolonization. Indeed, the evictions in both Kalama and Waiāhole-Waikāne emerged out of intersections between kama‘āina haole,3 local residents, and Native Hawaiian interests. In December 1974, the heirs of the ex-missionary turned rancher Lincoln McCandless allowed Mrs. Loy McCandless Marks to develop close to 3,000 acres of land in Waiāhole-Waikāne for high-end 2-acre residential homes. Windward Partners raised the leases on farmers and tenants by as much as 745 percent overnight. Tenants delayed eviction for more than a year, staging marches, rallies, benefit concerts, tours of the valley, and a final stand-off with police. Windward Partners itself was composed of developer Joe Pao, local labor leaders Art Rutledge and Hal Lewis, as well as nisei senator Mitsuyuki Kido. Ironically, their employers, the McCandless family, were kama‘āina haole and also one of the largest landowners in the islands. The annexationist and patriarch Lincoln McCandless was called “Link the land Baron” because he amassed large amounts of land for ranching by dispossessing natives of their kuleana lands (Kelly and Aleck 1997). In Pak’s “Valley of the Dead Air” the fictional Cox family appropriates Jacob Ho‘okano’s land due to his inability to pay his taxes (11). The Bishop Estate that evicted residents in Kalama is one of the wealthiest private trusts in the nation, established by the late Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop to educate Hawaiians at the Kamehameha Schools and administer her considerable landholdings. Class alliance across racial and ethnic lines, then, is central to local identity formation. Jonathan Okamura defines local identity as a response by “subordinate social status groups” (Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Okinawans, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, and Hawaiians) in opposition to the dominant haole planter and merchant oligarchy (1994: 163). The class component of local identity played a significant role in the interethnic labor movement and in the democratic revolution of 1954 (163).4 The term “local” is not synonymous with the term “local community activism”: the latter designates activist subgroups within the broader category of “local.” Pak’s strength is the complexity of his portrayal of “local identity,” how it is indeed fractured and fragmented by often opposing aims and ideological positions. His stories articulate the emergence of an actual alliance, the “local,” which is made increasingly more tenuous by competing ethnic and racial definitions of identity, the historical legacies of two racializing institutions: the law and the plantation system. The definition of Hawaiian under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act—a legacy of U.S. imperialism in the Territorial Period—continually reappears in the 1980s and 1990s to complicate any attempts at unity the local might wish to produce out of shared oppressions under the plantation system oligarchy. Ironically, both of these legal and economic mechanisms worked to uphold the interests of the same oligarchy during the Territorial Period—as my discussion of Holt shows. The former produced extinction by dilution and the latter further reinforced the unequal access to land by its courting of global capital.5 But the situation is yet more complicated. For while Hawaiians and nonHawaiian locals were racialized by different legal and economic mechanisms, their racial identities were also intimately entangled in the laws which upheld

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the plantation system in the nineteenth century. For example, the indolence laws and Masters and Servants Act coerced Hawaiians who sought to maintain their subsistence lifestyle as well as immigrant laborers who were subjected to a brutal system of surplus cultivation. While both groups were oppressed by the same monarchical and legal structure that upheld the plantation system, they were also positioned as competitors in terms of land use. Plantation laborers could only fulfi ll their contracts by engaging in surplus production, and Hawaiians, if they maintained a subsistence lifestyle and resisted the encroachment of planters, would be criminalized as indolent. It is not, then, as if these two groups were moving along in parallel fashion through history; rather, their subjectivities were being interpellated by institutions which produced entanglement under shared oppressions. Local activism in its anti-development stance, then, presented a radical intervention in the ways Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians were interpellated historically. Many of the crucial local community struggles in the 1970s were inflected by an approach that was radically opposed to private land ownership, one motivated by a consciousness of how the privatization of land undermined the communal land tenure system of traditional Hawaiian subsistence and almost simultaneously brought to power the planter oligarchy which oppressed both Hawaiians and immigrant contract laborers and their descendants in a racialized system of labor. In the New Left-inflected approach of some local activists, Hawaiian communal land tenure and socialist thought are mingled in striking ways. While the goal of activism in Kalama Valley and Waiāhole-Waikāne was to preserve subsistence and small-scale farming, a left-inflected critique informed activist understandings of the historical and political context for the evictions.6 Many Kōkua Hawai‘i members came from a radical leftist core called the “Kaimuki Collective” or “the House” led by Kehau Lee, Lori and Ko Hayashi, Pete Thompson, Herb Takahashi, Gwen Kim, and Diane Choy (Niheu 1999: 44, 47; Trask 1987: 135).7 Marxism-Leninism and the inspirational figures of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh led local activists to appreciate Hawaii’s labor history, based in class struggle, “the role of Hawaii’s ethnic and working-class peoples in creating the wealth so inequitably distributed in the islands” (Witeck 1999: 12). Activist Bob Nakata states that Waiāhole-Waikāne was not billed as an exclusively Hawaiian struggle: “We did build it very deliberately that way on a class basis and not as an ethnic struggle” (1999: 70). Kōkua Hawai‘i also emphasized the importance of alliances across ethnic and racial difference by including both Hawaiians and other locals in leadership positions (Niheu 1999: 47). But class alliances could not address competing processes of racialization. Tensions between Hawaiian nationalist concerns and proletarian rights fractured the local movement. Kōkua Hawai‘i refused to aid the Protect Kaho‘olawe Ohana (PKO) because PKO was perceived as “cultural nationalistic” and not concerned with workers’ rights.8 Similarly, racial/ethnic and economic lines of cleavage split the Waiahole-Waikane Community Association (WWCA). The larger more affluent farmers were of Japanese ancestry, and in the early days of the struggle, they were in positions that allowed them to disproportionately influence decision-

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making (Geschwender 1980: 124). These middle-class farmers later “pulled back from the more radical actions” (64). But again, leftist critique provided direction for a more militant strategy. The involvement of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in 1975 stimulated the formation of a group within the WWCA called “Up in Arms” composed of smaller landowners and blue-collar tenants. The RCP urged a more militant strategy and sought out allies from other groups on a class basis. By late summer 1976, the WWCA Steering Committee was composed mostly of “Up in Arms” members. The new militant group opposed larger landowners and affluent farmers who acquiesced to a court order that tenants pay their rents at increased rates. The militant tactics of the WWCA led by “Up in Arms” included demonstrations at the police station—reminding officers of their class, ethnic, and kinship ties to the residents—as well as the blockading of the entrance to the Valley by an arm-linked crowd of several hundred persons, and the shutting down of Kamehameha Highway. These events led to the state’s purchase of Waiāhole for six million dollars to end the fight between Windward Partners and the WWCA. The association was victorious due to a class alliance that—unlike middle-class supporters who restricted their participation to legal and respectable activities—was willing to break the law to achieve their larger collective goals. The success of Waiāhole-Waikāne was an extension of previous struggles for economic and political democracy in the postwar years. However, even the connections between the RCP and WWCA were not as strong as they seemed. Bob Nakata notes the tension between left ists and locals. When an organizer began pushing the RCP line, he quickly alienated himself and other organizers from the community (1999: 71). This disjuncture between the local and the RCP appears in Darrell Lum’s short story “Paint!” (1986). There, the “hippy lady” inscribes “Revolution for the 80s. May Day” over the narrator’s surf picture, unaware of its specific cultural significance as social protest. Published in 1992, Pak’s collection reads the activist period of the 1970s through the lens of developments in native sovereignty and globalization. In “An Old Friend,” the narrator Dennis Lim memorializes his days as a community organizer, nostalgically recalling times when “the polemics weren’t mature or understandable or divisive yet” (160). This loose organization fractures: his activist friends drifted apart—Joe taking the reformist route, Dennis remaining a supporter of the revolutionary proletariat, and Pua, Joe’s wife, becoming part of IMUA!, a group of revolutionary Hawaiians for nationhood. These memories are stirred up by Lim’s growing anxiety about the small volcanic vents opening up in his backyard, evoking the then contemporaneous environmental and Kānaka Maoli protests against the harnessing of Pele’s power for geothermal energy. The narrator’s anxiety about the awesome natural and spiritual power of Pele and his own disturbing “thoughts of commercialism”—the harnessing of Pele’s power to generate electricity—suggest perhaps how the class struggle he believes in is at odds with the Hawaiian religious activists who worshiped Pele (156). The strange disappearance of his neighbors, a geologist and meteorologist, and his own insignificance in the face of Pele’s awesome power show how contemporary political struggle has changed radically from the coalition-based

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organizations of the 1970s to the sovereignty activism in subsequent decades. The fracturing of the local movement into reformists, nationalists, and leftists suggests three responses to increased and uneven penetration of global capital in Hawai‘i which intensified in the 1970s and after. As Rob Wilson argues, any version of the local that is to have any real staying power must attempt to theorize itself in relation to global postmodernity in which multinational capital is located everywhere but regulated nowhere (2000). One of Pak’s real strengths as a local writer is the connection he makes between various local responses and globalization itself. In Pak’s title story from the collection, “The Watcher of Waipuna,” globalization in Hawai‘i has everything to do with U.S. military supremacy in the Asia-Pacific, international tourism, and multinational investment. Hawaii’s military role in the American Pacific expands upon the Pacific as “American Lake” and Hawai‘i as a stepping stone for securing the region and Asia for U.S. markets and resource extraction. U.S. control of the region with Japan’s defeat in World War II laid the foundation for Japanese “cooperation” with U.S. attempts to stem the “red tide” of Communism in Korea, China, and Vietnam. This economic alliance between Japan and the U.S. is evident in HIC, the multinational parnership between U.S. mainland investors and the Tokyo Imperial Bank. Old man Nakakura represents early nisei opposition to three imperial forces: U.S. planter colonialism through the militant tactics of the ILWU; Japanese imperial expansion during the war; and subsequent U.S. martial law in the islands. His vigilance against the “frogmen” represents a guardedness toward both past and contemporary U.S. military and economic interests as well as Japan’s old imperial and recent neocolonial expansion. He believes the frogmen have come many times to “take ovah” and “were now hiding in the dense mangrove forest along the coast, some forty-plus years after the Big Surrender” (60, 21). The ambiguity of the actual referent for the frogmen indicates the elusive nature of U.S.–Japan political and economic cooperation in an age of globalization. Nakakura’s brief ally, Gilbert, also critiques U.S. military policy in the AsiaPacific. After fighting in Vietnam, he returns to find that his fiancée of 11 years, Tricia Kobashigawa, has run off with a fellow soldier, a haole GI. After the departure of “Miss Trish,” Gilbert quits his job and represses an impulse to kill the GI and then himself, burying his rifle along with his love for alcohol in a shallow grave. Soon after, he develops his multiple personality disorder, the classic response to trauma. Gilbert’s trauma, however, is not the result of shellshock in ’Nam; rather, it is a symptom of the contradictions of empire. Though he risked his life for “his country” (also the colonizer), his interests and the haole military’s interests are exactly at odds: his own physical and cultural survival are not on the military’s economic or political agenda. This was a common realization for local men returning from Vietnam. The demolition in Kalama Valley reminded vets of devastation in Indochina: “homes burned or bulldozed, people rounded up, evicted, and made homeless. And Kaiser and its corporate tentacles were involved in both scenarios of devastation and uprooting. The racism behind the war and the evictions in Kalama became apparent” (Witeck 1999:

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15). Local Hawaiian vet Ula Kawelo spoke out in Huli about these dispossessions. In both places the U.S. turned a “self-sustaining economy” in which people “live[d] off the land” into one motivated by big industry and profit, and made dependent upon the U.S. military and businesses. In ’Nam, Shell Oil and Standard Oil were buying up the coasts, and fire support bases provided lowpaying jobs and medical care for displaced villagers. The military secured the investments of U.S. corporations through the vital sacrifices of working-class Americans. He likened his activism to “fight[ing] for the same reasons the Vietnamese people are fighting for,” to be “free in our own land, in our own islands” (Huli June 1972: 10).9 In “Watcher,” as in Vietnam, subsistence is under threat. Due to its size, the length of time in Gilbert’s family, and its use for subsistence fishing and gathering, the Sanchez land is probably a kuleana land grant received from Kamehameha III during the Māhele of 1848. Precisely because it is a site of subsistence, it is targeted for development by HIC, his sisters, and the state’s support of tourism. Today, Hawaii’s primary industry is no longer sugar and pineapple but tourism. Since the advent of jet travel, this industry has become dominated by multinational corporate tourism, where networks of airlines, travel agencies, hotels, and international banks keep profits returning to the metropole. The state’s role is to maintain the islands as an attractive investment by providing cheap labor, the environment and infrastructure—airports, sewerage systems, roads, and harbors. Huli called tourism a “new kind of sugar,” just another “high-rise plantation” where local people are “still the maids and servants for the Man” (Huli June 1972: 4). The result was low-end service jobs, lack of affordable housing, land speculation, increased homelessness and cost of living, and the exodus of locals to the continent. But the Big Five were major contributors to this state of affairs. Faced with low quotas for sugar and decreased profits—partly due to gains by unions—they sold agricultural land re-zoned as urban to developers, including overseas multinationals (Kent 1993: 67). Golf courses and mega-resorts sprouted overnight—combined with adjacent luxury single-family homes, townhouses, and condominiums for visitors to purchase as vacation homes.

Magic realism and the critique of liberal ideology While the Big Five courted multinational investors, they were also busily transforming themselves into multinationals. Along with the increase of U.S. investment abroad by the likes of U.S. Steel, IBM, Coca-Cola, Honeywell, Ford, and Standard Oil, the Big Five were expanding into overseas agribusiness even while phasing out agricultural operations in Hawai‘i. Areas of expansion included pineapple in the Philippines and Thailand, coffee and spices in Guatemala, mushrooms in Brazil, and bananas in Central America. Dillingham and the Big Five were also involved in mineral extraction in Australia as well as factories processing tropical hardwoods and light manufacturing in Southeast Asia. These overseas investments may be “the harshest legacy of Hawaii’s multinationals to the people of the Pacific and beyond” (Kent 1993: 118).

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A class-based local movement in the age of multinational capital must account for how conditions of labor in places as different as Hawai‘i, Colombia, and Mindanao, for example, are linked by the very fact of being controlled by some of the same corporate interests. To take one set of examples: Castle and Cooke’s investments in the Philippines, Central America, and Hawai‘i. By transferring operations in 1963 to a 20,000-acre plantation on Mindanao, the company regained its monopoly on the pineapple market and became the largest pineapple complex in the world. Castle and Cooke thereby erased the historic gains made by the ILWU and reestablished Hawai‘i plantation society circa 1930 in the Philippines (Kent 1993: 112). The company also was busy consolidating its multinational holdings in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan. Five years later in 1968, Castle and Cooke bought out the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company, at the time the largest producer of bananas in the world—a company with a long history of human rights violations. In the early twentieth century, Standard Fruit financed a debt-ridden Honduran government through private loans from one of its subsidiaries, Banco Atlántida. In other banana republics such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, the U.S. claimed limited supervision of the customs collection in exchange for short-term loans. In Honduras, however, Standard Fruit, the loaning agency, dominated the three major customs houses in the bananagrowing regions. The Vaccaro family who owned Standard Fruit was criticized for attempting to place an “unprecedented degree of power over a small nation into the hands of a private concern” (Karnes 1978: 77). In 1919 Standard Fruit, like its competitor United Fruit, brutally crushed a strike by its workers. Charging the company with illegally importing African American laborers to depress the already low wages, strikers seized and drove the company’s locomotives and fruit cars, picking up over a thousand strikers as they cruised toward the banana region of La Ceiba. Along the way, the strikers destroyed fruit along with bridges and warehouses. Company records indicate that troops opened fire on the strikers, though the actual number of dead is not known. When workers refused the offer of pay equal to that of other companies, martial law was declared. The U.S. Navy’s Sacramento was called in to quell disturbances, and strike leaders were arrested to avert U.S. intervention. United Fruit supported Standard with sympathetic lockouts, forcing the workers to return with the promise of a small wage increase (67–68). Under Castle and Cooke ownership, Standard Fruit in the 1970s was still engaged in similar tactics. Faced with a government tax of one dollar on each crate of exported bananas, the company declared the tax illegal. In the nowfamiliar mode of multinationals, the company threatened to move its operations and cease investment. It halted production, leaving thousands of crates rotting on the docks and thousands of people jobless. In this example of what is known as “global market discipline,” workers accepted that it was “proper” that jobs be lost because the company “had to” move where wages and social conditions are more competitive (Hoogvelt 1997: 124). As in Hawai‘i, Castle and Cooke continued to control the political climate of its sites of investment. Panama later

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accused the company of plotting to assassinate its president and to overthrow the governments of Costa Rica and Honduras. The company also maintained close ties to dictator Ferdinand Marcos: company president Malcolm MacNaughton was Marcos’s confidant and supported his “New Society” plan. The Philippine government approved of the company’s repressive tactics, ordering police to shoot and arrest organizers found in Dolefi l fields. Ex-dictator of Nicaragua, Anastazio Somoza, was also a close friend of MacNaughton (Kent 1993: 116–17). As recently as 1988, Standard Fruit has been involved, along with Del Monte and United Brands, in the systematic assassination of banana workers in Colombia. In November 1988, 150 workers connected with unions were killed during a military crackdown in northern Colombia. Funded by Castle and Cooke and others, the deployment involved 10,000 troops—one for every two workers. In September 1987, at the beginning of these exercises, all founding members of the banana trade union movement had been assassinated or subjected to assassination attempts. Nine days before local elections 29 people were killed, 20 of whom were workers and nine of whom were left-wing politicians (“Banana Ban” 1988: 27). Large multinationals such as Castle and Cooke, Unilever, Del Monte, and United use similar tactics all too familiar to anyone aware of labor history in Hawai‘i: the use of a racially segregated workforce to divide workers; the amassing of large tracts of land to prevent land reform; the support of dictators and oppressive governments; the abuse of small farmers and cooperatives; the use of militarized force; and the lack of accountability to workers and the nation in which they do business (Enloe 1990: 142).10 The Big Five’s abandonment of agriculture in Hawai‘i led to dependency on tourism. In Pak’s “Watcher” the faceless Japanese investors of Tokyo Imperial Bank and their haole panderers disrupt pockets of subsistence by appropriating rural lands and access to the ocean itself, thereby making those displaced dependent upon the tourist economy and its degrading low-paying jobs. Even further, Hawaiian International’s complete lack of connection to the community, its people and history, allows it to wreak havoc within the town and its families. The increased international mobility of capital, known as “financial deepening,” disrupts the social relationships in which money and wealth were previously embedded, producing a situation called “disembedding” (Hoogvelt 1997: 129). We see this in the fragmentation of Gilbert’s family, Tricia Kobashigawa’s abandonment of Gilbert, Lola’s infatuation with the opportunistic Wilkins, Lucy’s confused allegiance to Lola, and the town’s envy at Gilbert’s instant success. While the influx of multinational capital disrupts the community, it also simultaneously consolidates linkages within the advanced capitalist countries (in this case, the U.S. and Japan) and marginalizes locales within these countries, making them dependent on metropolitan capital. This intensification of core linkages and marginalization of sites within the core itself is a crucial aspect of disembedding: It is because of this “disembedding” that globalisation entails a process of intensification of linkages within the core of the global system, while its

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“Talking in circles” counterpart “peripheralisation” becomes a process of marginalisation and expulsion that cuts across territories and national boundaries, rendering areas within the traditional core subject to the same processes of expulsion as large swathes of territories in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Hence the structure of core–periphery becomes a social division, rather than a geographic one. (Hoogvelt 1997: 129)

A U.S. state (Hawai‘i) and Honduras, Colombia, and the Philippines are linked by their mutual peripheralization via some of the same multinationals. Though Gilbert’s subsistence lifestyle is the cause for his initial marginalization, he is further marginalized by the U.S. military and its corporate interests—which he defended in Vietnam. Together, they undermine his efforts to live and exist as a Hawaiian. Sites of peripheralization whose connections span national boundaries are reflected in Pak’s aesthetic strategy of magic realism. Pak evokes the seminal scene of magic realist critique of multinational capital, the banana company episode in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.11 Like the army that establishes martial law in Macondo, HIC’s “battalion” of trucks, tractors, and cranes is an “army of occupation” (81). Both texts critique the liberal bourgeois subject that undergirds colonial and neocolonial conditions. One of the matriarchs in the Buendia family, Fernanda del Carpio represents strict control of property and inheritance—and of sexuality that threatens bourgeois respectability. She controls her daughter Meme’s sexual attraction to a lowly car mechanic, going as far as having the father of Meme’s child shot and paralyzed under the guise of killing a chicken thief (1991: 297). She sends her son to Rome in order to become, she hopes, the next pope, only to be confounded by the barbarity of her daughter Amaranta Ursula who commits incest and spawns the last son, Aureliano, “a dry and bloated bag of skin” that is devoured by ants (420). The intricate “labyrinths of blood” end, however, in two descendants, both illegitimate—one a bastard, the other a product of incest—both possessing the same name as the original patriarch of the line. Aureliano, Meme’s son, is also destroyed in the act of reading the already scripted future, the apolcalyptic destruction of Macondo and of the narrative itself. Fernanda’s brutally rational liberalism—associated with public order and the law—contrasts with her brother-in-law José Arcadio Segundo’s anarchism and reported lunacy (304). Gilbert’s multiple personalities undermine the assumptions of liberal individualism that undergird empire and the law. The story, after all, is preoccupied with the manipulation of Gilbert through legal documents: deeds, wills, powers of attorney, and trusteeships. Gilbert’s many personalities frustrate HIC’s attempts to propose a land deal. When the company’s agents attempt to make their first offer, they ask to speak to the owner of the property, Gilbert’s aphasic father of the same name. Gilbert replies, “‘Das me and my father. His name is Gilbert and so is mines’” (25). The lack of clear boundaries to Gilbert’s identity, indeed its deep embeddedness within his genealogy, frustrates the assumptions

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of individual ownership central to property and the law. Even his own sister’s attempts to dispossess him are undermined by his guileless multiplicity. Lola visits him twice, once to persuade him to see the lawyer and the second time to trick him into revealing his insanity. Gilbert’s various personalities disrupt her brutal rationality. She declares with exasperation, “‘I feel like I talking in circles!’” and scolds him, “‘Gilbert, try make sense!’” (49). Pak’s parodic evocation of trauma—the humorous debates between Gilbert’s various personalities—contrasts with prior texts’ fairly straightforward use of trauma to reference contact and colonization. His condition instead registers the contradictions of empire while also putting trauma to different uses. Gilbert’s trauma constitutes part of a resistance strategy. Gilbert’s illiteracy complements this strategy. He refuses to see the lawyer because he “‘no can read’” (51), and we know from the first scene that he is unable to sign his name. Gilbert exists outside the literate, legal, and liberal world of property and almost wholly within the non-standard, unwritten world of spoken pidgin. Indeed, it is within this realm of the oral that Gilbert’s stewardship over the land is affi rmed. His parents make their wishes known through speech, advising their children, “‘No let no haole step on dah land’” (64). Though the deed may not list Gilbert’s name as owner, his parents tell their children that the land belongs to him (63). The parents’ subsequent aphasia renders them even further removed from literate discourse, leaving their children to live by their spoken instructions. The contrast between official literate discourse and informal oral modes is also central to One Hundred Years. After the brutal massacre of union members, official proclamations erase the event itself and any hint of government misconduct: “The official version repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand, was finally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped” (315). This official version of history all but obliterates the only living witness, José Arcadio Segundo who tells the story of the massacre to shocked strangers. The soldiers who come in search of him are literally unable to see him. He fears they will bury him alive, so much has he ceased to be recognized in this “reality” (318). The company’s lawyers argue that since the workers were all “hired on a temporary and occasional basis,” they did not exist (307). This “hermeneutical delirium”—one all too familiar in recent years—is produced by literate legal discourse, which in Gilbert’s case works to produce the claim of mental incompetence. In both texts the popular modes of oral storytelling and witnessing affirm the existence of an alternate reality to the officially produced one, though the reality of resistance goes largely unrepresented, only hinted at. The months of rain in Macondo are a metaphor for left ist resistance to Mr. Brown and his soldiers. After the rains end, people find that every last banana plant has been uprooted (320). Likewise, in Waipuna, the destruction of HIC’s trucks and tractors is attributed to the rain of frogs that seems to have caused, mysteriously, the collapse of the underground caves (84). Stories

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of supernatural events—“heavy-handed spirits,” a fireball (akualele), and nightmarchers—coincidentally occur alongside the destruction of company property (84). In both texts historical reference is balanced alongside an unofficial, occult representation of resistance. Pak’s text evokes Waiāhole-Waikāne and other local sites of resistance, while García Márquez’s refers to an actual 1928 strike in Colombia. Banana workers struck, demanding of United Fruit higher wages (not payment for piecework), the abolition of company stores, and the construction of hospitals. Organized under radical socialist leadership, the strikers decried American imperialism in Latin America via United Fruit which had established itself in Colombia in 1889. According to José David Saldívar, United Fruit was charged with being what it patently was, “an imperialistic force in their local economy” (1991: 43). During the strike, the company refused to consider parttime laborers as employees and rejected their demands. Workers responded by sabotaging the cutting and transport of bananas. On December 6, 1928, government troops opened fire on workers, leaving an official number of 13 workers dead. The exact number of murdered strikers is not known, but García Márquez’s text suggests they numbered in the thousands. Saldívar has lauded the novel’s banana company episode as “an interpretive analysis of a real historical event from a radical point of view,” “perhaps the most significant ideological event in Third World American narratives” (1991: 44). Macondo’s destruction occurs because the town has been forced by the company to “become part of the global economic system, a satellite within the world system” (28). The “solitude” of the novel’s title is the Marxian political idea of “anti-solidarity,” the solitude that comes from everyone acting for himself (41). The aesthetic and political connection between multinational exploitation of workers in Latin America and in Hawai‘i, then, is made quite clear in Pak’s evocation of One Hundred Years. This is not so much a fi liative relation of descent from García Márquez to writers such as Wendt and Pak but rather a responsive relationship to one another, expanding upon earlier locally-specified critiques to include other local resistances against the imperial and multinational tentacles that inevitably connect them. Notions of the “Pacific Rim” and “Asia-Pacific” which led many corporations to divest themselves locally in exchange for overseas investments also produces the marginalization and peripheralization of the Basin region and Latin America. While magic realism in Rushdie, for example, has been seen—and rightly so—as a cosmopolitan genre, the authors in this study make connections across national boundaries in the region, between resistance struggles for decolonization and self-determination on the basis of having experienced similar systems of colonial and global exploitation.

Marginalization and the law “Watcher’s” similarity to a key text of magic realism extends to a much deeper historical understanding of the linkages between global capital and plantation colonialism, specifically the mutually constitutive relationship between the plan-

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tation system and the law. Pak’s portrayal of Gilbert is controversial precisely because it seems to perpetuate so many of the negative stereotypes of locals and Hawaiians: his persistent pidgin, illiteracy, joblessness, love for alcohol, and naive and trusting nature.12 However, this portrait is actually produced by the local community itself: “Gilbert Sanchez didn’t know it, but he was going crazy. Everyone in the village of Waipuna knew about it, even old man Nakakura, who was himself half-crazy” (21). The majority of the community at this point supports HIC’s development plan. Their portrayal of Gilbert as “crazy” is part of a larger logic of surplus production. Their corroboration of Lola’s image of Gilbert’s insanity helps her to gain legal control over the land. The community also perpetuates negative stereotypes about Hawaiians generated through legal mechanisms such as the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920. The law not only established the legal definition of native Hawaiian as 50-percent or more blood quantum but did so through the notion of Hawaiian “incompetence.” The interests of sugar planters and ranchers were well-represented in these debates, as we saw in chapter one. Native Hawaiian authenticity and eligibility for “rehabilitation” on homesteads was predicated on the “essential, racialized characteristic of incompetence” (Kauanui 1999: 135). Two contrasting meanings of incompetence become relevant for understanding Gilbert and his uncle, Jacob Ho‘okano. Gilbert’s incompetence is associated with insanity and an inability to care for himself. In contrast, Jacob’s evokes the reproductive incompetence central to congressional debates over the HHCA. There, “full-blood” Hawaiians were viewed as most in need of rehabilitation: due to their high mortality rates, they were perceived to be incapable of reproducing themselves and therefore under threat of extinction (135). The threat of extinction is central to understanding the opening story of Pak’s collection. “The Valley of the Dead Air” tells of the Kanewai community’s attempt to rid itself of a persistent malodor that appears due to their unkind actions toward the deceased Jacob Ho‘okano. Jacob is most likely Gilbert’s maternal uncle, since the narrator tells us that Gilbert’s mother is from Waipuna and her relatives are buried there (while Gilbert’s father is from the outer islands) (34). The causes of Jacob’s resentment include two slights. Jacob’s romantic rival, Joseph Correa, tells his beloved’s parents that Jacob “didn’t have a prick and that he was mahu” (effeminate and/or homosexual man) (17).13 Harmless as this seems, this rumor about Jacob refuses to die. Earl Fitzhugh and Darryl Mineda discuss whether Jacob has any heirs and wonder, “‘[W]ho goin’ get his land now he ma-ke [dead]. He no mo’ children, eh?’” (12). They speculate, “‘Maybe das why [Jacob] got all salty’” (12). The myth of Hawaiian incompetence continues to circulate via rumor and insinuation, in effect denying a public existence to Jacob’s heirs and his reproductive competence. The effect of rumor in shaping popular opinion is made clear when the narrator tells us offhandedly that Jacob had a wife who died a few years ago and that his son and daughter were living in town (34). The separate stories in the collection refer to one another, producing the novelistic effect that depicts the various enclaves within a fictional community. The title of the story plays upon the crucial issues of incompetence,

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reproduction, and inheritance. The community produces out of the flimsy web of gossip the stereotype of incompetence that deprives Jacob of public acknowledgment of his heirs and tacitly consents to his dispossession by the Cox family through legal devices such as adverse possession. Gilbert’s competence is also questioned, especially because his future wife, Tricia, abandons him and because his physical and cultural survival are threatened by military service and the loss of his means of subsistence. Even Lola’s plan to gain power of attorney over Gilbert threatens to establish him as a ward, thus evoking the way Hawaiians are legally defined as wards of the state (Trask 1993: 33). Nothing in the U.S. Constitution prevents the taking of native lands or the unwilling incorporation of native peoples into the U.S. (32). The wardship status of Hawaiians extends to the state and federal government’s abuse of nearly 200,000 acres of Hawaiian Homes trust lands for airports, military housing, schools, parks, private homes, and refuse sites. Meanwhile, 20,000 families remain on the waiting list for homesteads. Like children and the mentally incompetent, Hawaiians are considered wards of the state, and as such, Hawaiian Homes Lands recipients are without litigation rights to challenge illegal uses of land. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an extension of the state government, has no jurisdiction over the abuse of trust lands (92–94). While Nixon in the 1970s officially transferred U.S. Native Americans from wardship to self-determination—which implied federal commitment to tribal self-government—Native Hawaiians remain confined to wardship status, despite the Apology Bill and efforts in recent Congressional sessions to establish federal recognition of Hawaiians as a native people.14 One can argue also that Hawaiian Homes land reveals a contradiction within U.S. imperial policy. While a variety of state and private interests benefit from these lands, Hawaiians themselves are not allowed to own these lands. Rather, they are allowed only a lease agreement that can be passed on only to family members of particular blood quanta (originally 50 percent, but now 25 percent). This discourages investment and improvement to the homestead, actually barring Hawaiians from the liberal dream even while holding it out as an elusive ideal. The infantilization of wardship also extends to private institutions. In the pages of Huli, Kōkua Hawai‘i declared that local people were “grown up”: “We don’t need any haole trustees running Bishop Estate telling Hawaiians how their kids should be educated” (June 1971: 6). Like Lola, the Bishop Estate was accused of betraying its Hawaiian “brothers and sisters.” In places such as Kalama Valley, the Estate, administered at the time by governor-appointed non-native trustees, made large financial gains while leaving the large majority of Hawaiians out in the cold. In the early 1990s all over Hawai‘i the Bishop Estate and other landowners sold land to homeowners at high prices during the lease-to-fee conversion. Meanwhile, the trustees have been plagued by scandal after scandal involving the misappropriation of Estate funds for personal use. Similarly, Lola intends to profit personally by selling the land set aside for her brother’s livelihood.15 The notion of wardship infantilizes Hawaiians as incapable of govern-

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ing their own affairs, a trope about Pacific Islanders discussed in chapter two. This critique of infantilization and pejoration is expressed on an aesthetic level. Pak’s Gilbert evokes Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa’s satire of development, Tales of the Tikongs. In Tales the quiet revolutionary Manu rides his bicycle around the island of Tiko shouting anti-development slogans. Humorously and pointedly critiquing Australian and Japanese plans to transform Tiko into a floating fish cannery, Manu shouts, “WHY ARE YOU DESTROYING MY COUNTRY?” and “TIKO HATES YOU!” (1994: 18–19). Gilbert recalls the innocent Ika Levu who is wooed by Sharky, the Australian representative of a multinational fishing equipment manufacturer who stands to gain from Tiko’s new industry. “Ika,” which means “fish,” is cast as small prey for larger global predators. Sharky gets the trusting Ika to work as a surplus fisherman, coercing him into purchasing on loan the requisite fishing equipment: “So with the infinite patience and gentleness of an expert native handler Sharky went through the whole routine a few more times until Ika got the message. Ika was thoroughly frightened and confused. He was also flattered. No Important Person had ever before sought his help, let alone talked to him. And although he was full of doubt Ika prayed to God for guidance and consented to accept the loan” (22). Pak represents Gilbert in similar fashion. When Gilbert sees the caravan of HIC limos winding their way up the highway, he confusedly assumes that they have come to deliver his weekly groceries. Hau‘ofa’s Ika, unable to repay the loan, sinks the boat, defaults on the loan, and spends his days patching up an old dinghy and talking story with friends. The narrator assesses the situation saying, “Not all are so fortunate” (26). Gilbert’s illiteracy and his many personalities confound developers by parodying the official colonial view of infantile natives and critiquing the developmental trajectory that grounds infantilization. Gilbert’s easy-going subsistence persists despite nineteenth-century laws targeting Native Hawaiians and immigrant contract laborers. Prior to the arrival of the first laborers in 1852, the majority of plantation workers were Hawaiian. Europeans and Americans found themselves hard pressed to persuade maka‘āinana (commoner Hawaiians) to labor on the plantations and blamed business failures on the perceived laziness, stupidity, and obstinacy of Hawaiians. This perceived idleness must be read in terms of Hawaiians’ ability to subsist through traditional farming and fishing and thereby frustrate development plans. They were not easily converted to missionary “industriousness” or committed to turning underutilized land into the desired “stream of profit” (Beechert 1985: 24). Shortly after the establishment of the first plantations, the first law against idleness was passed in 1842. Delinquent maka‘āinana were punished by chiefs with three months’ hard labor. Neglected and overgrown farms were repossessed and the tenants evicted. If idleness continued for over a year, sheriffs employed the man on public works. Four years later, a second indolence law made idleness a crime against the state (and not a crime against the chiefs, as before). This marked the official end of communal stratified Hawaiian society since the state now substituted for chiefly authority. Persons sitting idly by or devoting themselves to “folly” and unable to pay for board or clothing were put at

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hard labor for three months. The unemployed were contracted to an appropriate employer for a period of one year. The wages from this indentured servitude— the example of contract labor prior to the arrival of Chinese laborers—were divided equally between the sheriff, the treasury, and the worker. In this combined apprenticeship and vagrancy law, workers who failed in their agreement with masters were deemed criminal by the state. Contract labor, then, in its initial form was exacted under the penal code, such that when immigrant laborers entered the picture, they also came under this realm of the law. In 1850, a third law allowed for punishment of persons for vagrancy, begging, and idleness. By this time, subsistence practice placed a person outside the law. The economic basis for practicing and maintaining Hawaiian culture was thereby outlawed. This series of laws suggests the way laziness is a form of resistance against western capitalism. As Teresia Teaiwa points out, the lazy native resists enslavement to the colonizer’s work ethic: “In master/slave narratives, wherein dominance equals leisure and submission yields labor, the most radical act for the slave is saying ‘No’; is saying ‘I will not step-and-fetch-it-for-you, massah.’ Under nearslavery conditions, saying, ‘Yes! I am a lazy coon,’ was an act of resistance” (1999: 12). These laws, then, attempted to convert subsistence Hawaiians into docile laborers. In 1850, during the same period of the Māhele and acquisition of land by planters, the Masters and Servants Act instituted the legal constraints for both apprentices and contract laborers. It remained part of the penal code until 1877. All contract violations during this period were considered criminal offences against the state, not civil cases to be settled between individuals. Workers who went against their contracts were punished with fines, imprisonment at hard labor, or both. If left unpaid, these fines were enforced by penal servitude. In other words, if a laborer could not amass the cash needed to pay the fine—which could easily be the case, given the use of scrip and credit at plantation stores— one could ostensibly be faced with an indefinite or life-term prison sentence. Workers often did not have legal representation and since proceedings were conducted in the Hawaiian language, many foreign workers could not plead their cases effectively. And, no appeal to higher courts was allowed. The act of taking one’s case to the court, which was often located far away from the rural plantations, required that a worker absent himself from lawfully ordered service, thereby requiring he commit a criminal offence to make the complaint (Beechert 1985: 45, 56). The master could require that any work not performed during the period of absence or “desertion” be repaid two-fold, thereby further extending the contract period. By 1860 the law required three-month prison terms for second offences of desertion, and by 1872 it was legally possible to compel “indefinite servitude—a legal system of slavery”—from a worker who willfully and repeatedly violated the contract. Corporal punishment by masters, such as whippings and abuse, was frequent and the source of constant complaint to which there was little recourse. Strikes, demonstrations, and “riots” often occurred to protest such abuse, but if a worker struck his employer or returned a blow using a weapon, he was punished with five years’ imprisonment for assault. When his

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prison term expired, the worker was required to return to the master to complete his contract term (50–1). By annexation in 1898 this system had devolved into a system of servitude or peonage because workers had no voting rights due to racist restrictions and property requirements (57). The Organic Act of 1900 abolished all contracts, and indentured laborers became free labor, able to organize and bargain for the terms of employment under U.S. law. The nineteenth-century state of peonage is reflected in the case of Katsu Goto who was lynched by plantation overseers in October 1889 in Honoka‘a on the island of Hawai‘i. The story of Katsu Goto provides the historical basis for Pak’s “The Trial of Goro Fukusima.” Goto’s body was found hanging by the neck from a telephone pole a day after the workers sought out the storeowner’s advice in a dispute with their master, Overend. The planter already suspected Goto of inaccurate translations and for inciting workers to set fire to a cane field. During the trial of Goto’s lynchers, 400 Japanese workers at the Hakalau plantation struck. The workers marched over 10 miles to Hilo to protest overtime without pay and to request transfers to other plantations. These actions were taken despite Overend’s threats that “[b]y and by all same Goto, make die” (Yoneda 1971: 13). Roughly translated, Overend threatened, “Eventually all of you, like Goto, will die.” Four men were indicted for second- and third-degree murder in the lynching of Goto. The practice of Hawaiian subsistence and the life of contract laborers, then, are linked historically through laws that criminalized alternatives to the plantation system. The militancy of workers provides the basis for the democratic revolution and the rise of local activism depicted in Nakakura and Gilbert’s brief alliance. But the militant roots of the ILWU also had an international element. In Pak’s novel A Ricepaper Airplane (1998) the protagonist Kim Sung Wha, a rebel Korean peasant fighting the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, escapes to Hawai‘i as a contract laborer. His yearning to return to wife and child in Korea is expressed in a dream to build an airplane out of ricepaper. After he spends many years teaching guerilla tactics to fellow laborers, Sung Wha lives out the rest of his days in a Chinatown tenement besieged by plans for urban renewal. In Ricepaper Pak elucidates the complexity of diasporic local identity in the character Sung Wha who fights for a place in Hawai‘i to “put his head down” even while he remains deeply connected to liberating his homeland. However, Nakakura’s solitary existence and his marginalization by the community also suggest his status as a throw-back to the early days of worker militancy that produced the rise of the Democratic Party. Nakakura’s misplaced and misdirected militancy suggests how the party and the ILWU are unlikely enclaves for radical change today partly due to their long control of state government which supported development, tourism, and multinational capital. Differing views about what constitutes social change prove significant enough to produce local activism and the sovereignty movement. Local opposition to uncontrolled development was based on the notion of aloha ‘āina and mālama ‘āina, a custodial relation or stewardship over the land based upon traditional Hawaiian subsistence practices of gathering, fishing, hunting, and farming. The

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incompatibility between class-based interests of the ILWU and the practice of Hawaiian culture proved to be at odds precisely because true land reform had not occurred. Hawaiian subsistence remained threatened by big business, multinationals, tourism, and land development. This is apparent when Gilbert and the old man interpret “dah Sign”—the cloud formations—differently. Nakakura-san sees the enemy in a frog-shaped cloud, whereas Gilbert just sees a cloud. After Nakakura-san’s death, the cloud morphs into a pig’s head.16 The lack of true land reform has led to contemporary legal battles over the practice of subsistence, battles that echo the indolence laws’ criminalization of indigenous cultural practice. In pre-contact Hawai‘i, Hawaiians subsisted within a communal land tenure system overseen by chiefs who collected taxes in the form of food. Commoners, however, had rights of access to the land and sea and cultivated small parcels of land (kuleana). All of this was threatened when private property and individual ownership steadily edged out traditional subsistence. The practice of Hawaiian culture and identity became a highly politicized terrain in the 1970s. Activists such as Ula Kawelo were part of a group of Hawaiians fighting to protect their kuleana lands from big development in Kahalu‘u. They organized in order to avert development plans to create a deep-draft harbor which threatened fishing grounds (Nakata 1999: 72). The plight of Sam Lono, a kuleana landowner and kahuna in Haiku Valley was also made known in Huli. In response to Lono’s repeated complaints of harassment by Haiku Plantations subdivision, the developer Ken Smith charged Lono with trespassing on subdivision roads in his effort to reach his kuleana deep in the valley.17 By law, Lono had the legal right of access through the subdivision. Residents also harassed Lono’s visitors, including school children, who came to learn about Hawaiian medicinal herbs. Lono, in turn, rightly argued that subdivision residents were trespassing on his land to reach trailheads deep in the valley (Huli November 1972: 10). But the cause for the harassment of Lono stemmed from the fact that the subdivision itself was built on Bishop Estate land. In 1971 when Bishop Estate evicted Kalama Valley farmers and tenants, trustee William van Allen refused to have Lono arrested along with his fellow protesters. Lono, being a kahuna, cursed the four Bishop Estate trustees. Huli reported, “Lono put a curse on the four remaining Bishop Estate trustees (one died recently). Lono said that they would be sick for a long time and not know why” (Huli May 1971: 5). In 1971 police arrested Lono and some of his relatives for initiating a control burn on his property in order to plant medicinal herbs and taro. Lono viewed this action as harassment that prevented the practice and maintenance of culture: “‘Everytime we try to do something to preserve our Hawaiian culture, these rich people make complaints against us. This kind of harassment from people like the Homeowner’s Association, the Bishop Estate, the State and the rich developers, has been going on for over seven years. If they think we going to give in, they’re wrong! Cause we going fight!’” (Huli October 1972: 6). Sam Lono’s situation is similar to Jacob Ho‘okano’s in that both have been ostracized by the community, practice a subsistence lifestyle, and are kahuna. The maintenance of Hawaiian cultural identity in the cases of Sam Lono

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and Pak’s character Jacob Ho‘okano is central to current legal cases involving the exercise of stewardship. As Ulla Hasager argues, indigenous Hawaiian territory is not merely sections of land and water but also total ecological systems and cultural landscapes. Without collective access to and control of territory, the practice of culture—individual or collective—becomes aimless (1999: 175). Kānaka Maoli claims to customary and traditional rights have everything to do with preserving their identity and history as a people. Four recent cases are central to the legal debate over the extent of subsistence gathering under traditional and customary Kānaka Maoli rights: Kalipi v. Hawaiian Trust Co. Ltd. (1982), Pele Defense Fund v. Paty (1992), Public Access Shoreline Hawai‘i v. Hawai‘i County (1995), and State of Hawai‘i v. Alapai Hanapi (1998). In the most recent of these cases, Alapai Hanapi attempted to establish stewardship over privately-owned land by showing that he and his family exercised traditional and customary right over the many generations his family cared for fishponds and wetlands on land owned by a lawyer, Galiher (175). The court ruled that Native Hawaiians and perhaps others can access land that is not fully developed and not zoned residential. The concept of stewardship is evoked in Pak’s short story when Gilbert becomes a “watcher,” or custodian, guardian, and caretaker. Hasager explains that while there is evidence for the validity of stewardship as traditional and customary Native Hawaiian practice, it is also clear that stewardship must not be limited by the “randomly imposed borders of modern private property” because it requires consideration of “total eco-cultural systems” (1999: 175). In fact, the maintenance of subsistence lifestyle on kuleana lands has been threatened ever since the Kuleana Act was passed in 1850. Unfortunately, the act which awarded parcels to commoners for subsistence purposes resulted in only a small number of awards: only 30 percent of Hawaiian men received any land, leaving 70 percent of adult men landless (M. Kelly 1980: 66). And, difficult access as well as legal mechanisms such as adverse possession threatened the legitimacy of kuleana claims. As large plantations and ranches dominated the economy, subsistence within traditional Hawaiian land divisions (ahupua‘a) became increasingly more tenuous. 18 Kuleana holders discovered that ahupua‘a were incompatible with the plantation economy.19 Cane fields (or even subdivisions) gradually surrounded kuleana, impeding access. Eventually kuleana owners were forced off their lands by encroachment. Kuleana could not be easily expanded since they were often not adjacent, and small-scale commercial farming on kuleana parcels could not compete with the plantation system that discouraged diversified agriculture and cooperatives. The legal mechanism of “adverse possession” was also used to deprive kuleana holders of their lands. As Maivan Lam (1985) explains, adverse possession placed a 20-year statute of limitations on attempts by a kuleana holder to repossess land claimed by another party, and required the adverse possessor to prove his “actual, open, exclusive, and continuous” possession of the holder’s lands. This means the adverse possessor needed to show, for example, that a co-heir or descendant of the original kuleana holder had sold his partial interest in the parcel to the adverse possessor. The legal owner would have a maximum of 20 years to repossess the land;

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otherwise he would be unable to reclaim it. Only in response to increasing activism in the 1970s did the legislature and courts attempt to limit the opportunities for would-be adverse possessors. In 1978 the adverse possession law was modified such that no more than 5 acres could be adversely possessed at any one time, and not more than once in every 20 years by the same claimant. But, the greater protection for kuleana awardees and their descendants came far too late and at a time when plantations were shutting down and selling their parcels to resort developers. Customary gathering rights and subsistence activities are also threatened not only by the loss of Gilbert’s kuleana but also by the almost certain ecological damage due to development. The narrator states that the 3-mile “immaculate” beach on Gilbert’s homestead was known secretly to locals as “the best on the island for diving and shoreline fishing” (23). In 1973 an organization of local fishermen called Hui Malama Kai protested the Department of Land and Natural Resources Fish and Game Division’s “Kapuku Plan” which claimed that there was a decline in the numbers of fish and shellfish due to overfishing. The Plan placed restrictions on the catching of most fish, on the harvest of shellfish, octopus, squid, opihi, and wana (sea urchin), and attempted to close half of the coastal areas on O‘ahu for a two-year period. Hui Malama Kai took a firm stand, arguing that pollution from run-off generated by land development and increased sewage was the primary cause of the depleted fish supply. They claimed that developers had allowed the fi lling of several fishponds and the destruction of sensitive marine areas and that the livelihood and recreation of “innocent citizens” was threatened by this plan (Huli February 1973: 4). Government actions such as the Kapuku Plan threaten the livelihood of those Hawaiians and locals who rely on subsistence fishing for physical and cultural survival.

The oral/aural logic of “talking stink” The law—the indolence acts, the Kuleana Act, the harassment of kuleana holders, and the adverse possession mechanism—has indeed created many obstacles to subsistence. By contrast, these mechanisms allow individuals and corporations to amass large tracts of land for surplus production. From the official viewpoint of the law, subsistence practices do not “make sense” precisely because one cannot survive and remain a law-abiding citizen. The town begins to suspect Gilbert’s sanity when he quits his salaried job. In this way, the story shows how an increased reliance on subsistence gathering and fishing does not compute in the local economy. And, Gilbert’s multiple personalities that supposedly emerge out of this period of increased subsistence reinforce this pathologization of subsistence. His condition frustrates Lola’s attempt to gain power of attorney by making orderly discussion impossible. Lola scolds her brother, “‘Gilbert! Try make sense! . . . Make sense, all right?’” (49). Lola’s command that Gilbert “make sense” expresses her frustration with his refusal to “make cents,” to place the family land up for sale and make them all rich. Both Gilbert and his Uncle Jacob are ostracized by the community for their

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refusal to give up kuleana subsistence. And, they are both ostracized through rumor and gossip. Lola and Lucy’s attempt to keep Gilbert’s condition a secret soon shifts to a strategy of publicizing his incompetency (23). The rumor of Hawaiian “incompetence” is also projected upon Ho‘okano through the myth of reproductive “incompetence,” as I have shown above. In this way, rational thinking, profiteering, and rumor are connected through a series of puns: making “sense,” “cents,” and “scents,” for the circulation of negative and demeaning— and often untrue—gossip about a person is colloquially known in pidgin as “talking stink.” And “talking stink” about Jacob is exactly what produces the “fut smell” that pervades the valley. The villagers’ wrongdoings against Jacob over many years—Leimomi Vargas’s stealing a chicken egg, Elizabeth Kauhane’s brother’s rock throwing, and Joseph Correa’s slander regarding Jacob’s sexuality (16–17)—all belie the central crux that they are all living on stolen land, land which originally belonged to the Ho‘okanos but which was appropriated by the Cox family when the Ho‘okanos could not pay the taxes (11). While the villagers claim they are not responsible for the Ho‘okanos’ lost land, they are responsible for perpetuating stereotypes about Ho‘okano which marginalize and publicly dispossess him of heirs and the possibility of holding on to his kuleana. Even further, the farmers’ profits on the land might also be considered ill-gotten because of the suspect means by which the Cox family acquired the land. While gossip has been theorized as existing outside of the official,20 it works very differently in Pak’s collection. Pak makes the distinction between two forms of orality: “talking stink” and testimony. Because of the marginalization of subsistence, talking stink is explicitly allied with dominant modes of production (such as surplus farming and resort development); it is also often potentially slanderous. Here, slander works for personal gain (Lola’s monetary gain and Joseph Correa’s wifely gain), precluding the continuity of traditional subsistence. Making sense and making scents (or “talking stink”) are thus always motivated by “making cents.” The connection between bad smells and land development which adversely affected locals is evoked in a Huli article entitled “Halawa Kalama Same Smell” which compared the eviction of families living in Halawa Housing to the Kalama Valley evictions: “Sixty-six Halawa Housing families have until July 31 to find homes to make room for a new $30 million dollar stadium. They have nowhere to go and State Government has not kept its word to find them homes. Our local families get screwed again just as Kalama Valley residents did on March 11” (July 3, 1971: 2). In contrast, testimony attests to truth, but as might be expected, the representation of the “fact” of resistance in a community so closely allied with the law and surplus production is almost impossible when one notes that the laws uphold the rights of private property holders, surplus farmers, and land developers. The meaning of the term “huli,” as Niheu explains, suggests the notion of testimony: to “discover the truth in which to overturn, in which to make things pono . . . in building a new society based upon our indigenous values. Huli means find the truth, but huli also means to overturn” (1999: 59).21 Gilbert’s resistance against HIC is represented differently from blanket rumors such as “Everybody knew.”

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Rather, the narrator states, “Strange things started happening in Waipuna” and “Another thing happened” (83–84). These are statements that attest to the actuality of events narrated in the metaphorical referencing of magic realism. Just as in the Banana Company episode where the extended rains represent or stand in for the covert killing of union leaders and sabotage by workers, so the “rain of frogs” tacitly represents the battle between community activists and land developers. In attesting to the occurrence of night marchers, the narrator does not say, “Charlie the mailman said he saw” but rather “Charlie the mailman was the first to see it,” as if the event itself occurred apart from discursive construction or witnessing. Similarly, the narrator says Jimson Nakakura “saw his father straggling behind a line of ghosts,” and “Others saw the marchers, too” (84). Sonny Boy DeCosta swears to seeing the night marchers (84). The persons who circulate word that “heavy-handed spirits were enforcing jurisdiction over the area” are termed “soothsayers” (84). The language of testimony is strong here. But, significantly, both talking stink and testimony are oral forms that implicitly critique capitalism, whether it be its logic of surplus production or its manipulation of representation. The ghostly and occult nature through which resistance is narrated—which differs radically from the rather transparent narration of the community—suggests the ways in which narration is allied with that most official of narratives, history. Pak, like García Márquez, reveals how the written is always implicated or complicit in the law, just as the legal documents and the newspaper accounts of HIC’s link to the yakuza are representable, while the potentially illegal acts of resistance remain outside the law, outside written, realist, historical representation. In opposition to the discursive and literate is the power of the mythical, the oral in Pak’s stories, for the sense-scents-cents pun is only produced through its spoken/heard, oral/aural form. And, their meaning relies upon the peculiar familiar expressions of an illegitimate and non-standard vernacular, pidgin. Likewise, the air-heir pun relies on an oral logic. Even the slippage between HIC’s lawyer “Fogarty” and the “frogmen” is one not likely to occur on paper but rather in an oral/aural context. Pak, through this slippage, invokes the extremely popular (and late) local comedian Rap Raplinger whose annoying, haole character Fogarty was mistakenly called “Mr. Frogtree” by a local hotel operator. Oral logic also produces alliance. Gilbert and Lucy come to a common understanding through puns, slippages in oral/aural translation which in turn produce material transformations. When Lucy’s brother saves her from drowning in a storm, she confesses she helped “dah men”—HIC and Fogarty—to take away Gilbert’s land (74). Thinking she refers to the frogmen, Gilbert concurs. The surprised Lucy immediately clarifies: she would never of her own free will “sign” the property over to them. Gilbert, thinking she refers to “dah Sign”— the cloud formations in the sky—tells Lucy, “‘You said you saw dah Sign. Eh, I saw dah sign, too . . . Dat means both of us gotta do something about it’” (75). He shares his plan to chase the frogmen into the limestone caves (75). Mystified, Lucy returns home, only to be reminded of Gilbert’s plan by the most material of signs, almost drowning amid a torrent of frogs and seeing a dead toad on

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the road outside Fogarty’s office. Lucy’s realization, her translation of Gilbert’s story of frogmen to the invasion of HIC and their frogtree lawyer, relies upon the materialization of the oral/aural puns (“to sign” and “da Sign”; frogmen, Fogarty, Frogtree, and frogs). The slippery nature of puns, the instability of signification in an oral mode, then, produces the basis for alliance and resistance. But the material nature of the rain of frogs that prompts Lucy’s realization is also located within oral storytelling. Her husband, Clarence, tells his grandmother’s old story of a “rain of frogs”: “For months it had brought bad things to the valley. Taro patches rotted, schools of dead fish covered the beach and mothers miscarried a generation” (83). The oral/aural mode, then, is implicitly linked to the land, the natural world, and subsistence. The oral in Pak even takes on some of the creative qualities of Wendt’s Galupo. In “The Valley of the Dead Air” we discover that “talking stink” about heirs produces stink air, and in “Watcher” Gilbert’s mention of custard pie and stewed pig’s feet at Mama’s grave produces these edible delights. Even Joseph Correa’s talk of Ho‘okano’s questionable “manhood” produces shriveled sweet potatoes that are so small they “[l]ook like one prick” (11). The role of what Bakhtin terms the “lower body functions”22 in representing resistance is also crucial here in that the “fut smell” and the penis-shaped potatoes refer to another aspect of Hau‘ofa’s satire, the carnivalesque. In Hau‘ofa’s story “The Tower of Babel” sex and physical desire overwhelm attempts at development. The natives of Tiko who are enlisted to work on the fishing boat that will develop “the realm into a Nation with a Fish Cannery” are unable to remain at sea long enough to make the voyage financially worthwhile: “The first of their projected ninety days at sea was very nice, and the next few days at sea were also very nice. But by the end of the second week the much deprived youths wanted desperately to set for home and a bit of sex. On the third week nothing would keep them away and the vessel headed home with only four tons of tuna” (1994: 20). The paradoxical ideal of even and uniform development, the Top (neocolonizers like Australia and Japan) and the Bottom (natives of Tiko), are described in metaphorical terms as a woman’s body: “‘A well-rounded Bottom below a well-rounded Top is beauty well worth having,’ Manu declared, not thinking of tinned fish” (21). In Pak the carnivalesque of anti-development aesthetics takes a scatological form in the “fut smell” and the penis-shaped potatoes. The lower body functions, the scatalogical and the sexual, are crucial aspects of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years where sexually excessive and fertile figures such as Petra Cotes and Pilar Ternera explicitly contrast with sterile figures of control, law, and order such as Fernanda del Carpio. The former operate outside of the legal bounds of marriage and even incest prohibition while Fernanda rigidly enforces these boundaries. Pak’s evocation of the popular within the carnivalesque should also be seen in relation to the revival of the oral in García Márquez, Wendt, and Hulme, the re-empowerment of the vernacular and of oral storytelling, the culture of the everyday. Like Wendt’s revival of the oral, Pak’s evocation of an oral/aural logic is part of the revival of national culture through the transformation of the oral tradition, the stories, epics, and songs (Fanon 1963: 240). But, as Fanon claims

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and Pak shows us, the representation of the popular is next to impossible because the place of action is constantly in flux. Once the artist depicts the popular, he is already “out of date” (224). That “fluctuating moment” is what Fanon calls the “zone of occult instability where the people dwell” (224). For Pak’s “representation” of Gilbert and Lucy’s resistance to HIC is told through the community’s firm testimony to occult and mysterious events, hardly transparent representations but rather mystical in nature. Just as Wendt invokes the Mau movement in oblique and mystical terms (as lions and aitu), so Pak’s description of community resistance tempts the realm of the occult. The popular in Pak’s stories undermines the imperial discourses of history, psychoanalysis, standard English, and the law which naturalize U.S. colonial and multinational presence in the islands. Pak’s invocation of alternative newspapers subverts the authority of history and official accounts in constituting the truth about resistance movements. The occult and mystical testimony to the community’s opposition to global capital is one means by which these activities evade the transparency demanded by the law. Likewise, Gilbert’s “indolence,” his subsistence economy, threatens the injunction to surplus productivity that justified the existence of indolence laws and the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. The vernacular oral/aural logic undermines the “sense-making” and “centsmaking” imperatives of standard English and colonialism, particularly the way old-style U.S. imperialism has laid the groundwork for a more insidious and mobile form of multinational neocolonialism. In showing how the community’s pathologization of Gilbert is premised on their adoption of the official capitalist view of reality, Pak’s story reveals psychoanalysis to be implicated in the production of normativity and what Foucault would call “docile bodies,” bodies who function as smoothly working parts within the capitalist mode of production. It is Gilbert’s uncontainable traumatic symptoms that signal a mode of resistance. The presence of the scatalogical and lower body functions associated with the carnivalesque undermines capital’s logic of development. Pak’s use of pidgin as a “subsistence language” gives us a means to re-imagine our relation to one another and to place. Pak’s text makes a critical intervention on the location of the local in relation to the contemporary movement for Kānaka Maoli sovereignty, and he is doing so as a local. For Pak seems to be implicating the local as the “impurity” against which sovereignty attempts to define itself. While Gilbert Sanchez would probably be considered a part-Hawaiian (though it is unclear to what degree), and while he practices a subsistence lifestyle, his cultural identity is also entangled with those of other local ethnic groups. It might be safe to say that Gilbert is partPortuguese on his father’s side, and may have some Chinese ancestry, but his cultural practices suggest the intimate mingling of different traditions evocative of the local. He pours whiskey on his parents’ grave and enjoys eating his mother’s pickled mango and pig’s feet, traditions associated with Chinese culture in Hawai‘i. And, his subsistence practices are not absolute, for he does rely on groceries from the Nakakura store. The story, by revealing as constructed the notion of incompetence, critiques the racializing definition of Hawaiian. In doing so,

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Pak seems to appeal to cultural practice and descent (as separate from blood quantum) in determining Hawaiian identity. Gilbert’s ambiguity, when seen in relation to Pak’s implicit privileging and problematizing of the local in the emergence of the movement for sovereignty, can be read as an attempt to intervene in the production of a pure, teleological narrative which would ignore its historical entanglement with the experiences of non-Hawaiian locals. Pak’s contribution to the aesthetics of the popular connects him to other writers throughout the Pacific as well as to those in places as seemingly remote as Latin America who attempt to speak the truth about the local effects of colonization and multinational capital. Perhaps more than any other local Hawai‘i writer, Pak captures the complexity of local resistance, the way in which class and ethnic divisions complicate attempts at solidarity. But in pidgin, the common language of the local, he draws our attention to the means for decolonization across difference.

5

Making Pakeha history Familial resemblances in Jane Campion’s The Piano1

The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century. Stuart Hall

In “Culture, community, nation,” Stuart Hall argues that because of the increasing cultural diversity in the modern world, the “greatest danger” is posed by national and cultural groupings which “attempt to secure their identity by adopting closed versions of culture or community and by the refusal to engage— in the name of an ‘oppressed white minority’—with the difficult problems that arise from trying to live with difference” (1993: 361). Nationalisms which “reach for too closed, unitary, homogeneous and essentialist a reading of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ will have succeeded in overcoming one terrible historical hurdle only to fall at the second” (361). In former settler colonies where the struggle for justice by indigenous peoples confronts settler claims for an identity separate from the motherland, the white nationalism Hall describes can be particularly problematic due to its connection to the state. In contemporary postcolonial New Zealand/Aotearoa, biculturalism and multiculturalism are contentious and difficult issues. The early 1980s were marked by an official government shift away from a multiculturalism that presented the indigene as only one of many minority groups and toward a biculturalism that recognized the specific historical claims of the Maori over and above those of other groups (Sharp 1997: 228). Biculturalism as an approach focused on mana and on the right of Maori “to create and sustain a way of life independent of the Pakeha state” (230).2 According to this bicultural perspective, Maori are the “tangata whenua o Aotearoa”—literally, the “people of the land of Aotearoa”—which implies that Maori are born of the land, “their generations [are] buried in it, attached to it by indissoluble spiritual ties in a way that the Pakeha who regarded land simply as a commodity never could be” (8). Recognizing that tangata whenua are genealogically (spiritually) connected to the land means acknowledging that by prior occupation the land was originally and remained spiritually theirs; that by virtue of the Treaty of Waitangi they had agreed to an equal

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partnership with the Crown and with subsequent settlers . . . that te iwi Maori [or the Maori “tribe”] had nowhere else to go, whereas the visitors had their homelands in which their cultures thrived; that while the Crown had sovereignty, they had the rangatiratanga3 [or chiefly authority] appropriate to an equal partner. (230) The Treaty of Waitangi, signed by over 500 Maori chiefs in 1840, established the basis for this late-twentieth-century bicultural partnership between indigene and settler.4 In practice, however, the government’s approach in the 1980s was basically a form of multiculturalism with “special consideration” for Maori (228). But much has happened since Jane Campion wrote and directed The Piano which appeared in 1992 to wide acclaim at arthaus venues in Europe and the U.S. In the same year the “Sealord deal” which settled Maori claims to commercial fisheries was affirmed by the Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act. Two years later, the Crown proffered its infamous “fiscal envelope,” a $1 billion settlement to cover all tribal claims. Though the majority of tribes rejected the fiscal envelope outright, arguing that it failed to provide adequately for all iwi, two tribes, the South Island Kai Tahu and the east coast Whakatohea broke rank and were offered settlements by the Crown. Kai Tahu eventually negotiated a claim worth $170 million in 1998. By 2003 close to 20 iwi have made final settlements for compensation and land, and each year more negotiations occur. Though land claims are being settled, Maori are still subject to New Zealand laws which often undermine iwi autonomy. It is important that Campion’s fi lm be introduced as appearing toward the end of the period of calls by Maori for recognition of past wrongs and toward the beginning of the period of treaty settlements. For her film, in many ways, comments upon a contemporary moment in which national identity in New Zealand relied upon the simultaneous denial of indigenous claims to Aotearoa and the denial of its Commonwealth status as a result of Britain’s turn toward the European Community. Campion’s work remains in many ways unrepresentative of indigenous Fourth World fi lmmaking in Aotearoa. Her typically arthaus style in fi lms such as this one, Sweetie, and Holy Smoke goes against many of the documentary and explicitly Maori nationalist fi lms by Merata Mita, Barry Barclay, or Geoff Murphy, fi lms such as Patu!, Bastion Point—Day 507, Te Rua, and Utu. This difference between Campion and Fourth World filmmakers is precisely one of the reasons I introduce her film as a counter-example here. Whereas the other works in this book note the emergence of indigenous postcolonial nationalisms, Campion’s film shows how such nationalisms can be appropriated by a postcolonial white settler society for its own self-legitimating ends. In deploying my method for oppositional reading to this widely circulated text, I show how the re-insertion of the place-bound and the historical can unmask the way the film produces the viewer’s complicity with imperialism and colonialism precisely at the level of desire—romantic and otherwise. In this oppositional reading,

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the film both produces and undermines the desire for romantic love as well as for national authenticity through its generic claims and its evocation of imperial nostalgia; that is, precisely through its claim to being a film adaptation of a Victorian novel. The novel, co-written with Kate Pullinger and released two years after the film, proclaims its affinity to “the novels of the Brontës” and to that historical period. The back cover states, “The Piano is the poetic and erotic story of a Victorian woman’s sexual journey” (1993b). Audiences of the film, turning to the novel in hopes of finding their lingering questions about Ada’s muteness and Flora’s father answered, are immediately put off by the disclaimer/prologue which states that because the story of Ada and her piano has been “told and retold,” it is full of inaccuracies, “facts” which “were not all true.” The story contained in the novel—which makes no claim of accuracy in relation to the film—is a “version of the story pieced together from the testimony of Flora herself and of others who knew the family.” The prologue warns that the author “has taken the liberty of embellishing these descriptions in the manner of all storytellers.” Though the novel follows the screenplay fairly closely—even including extended passages of text verbatim—it does provide backstories of Ada’s love for her piano teacher Delwar Haussler, Baines’s brief marriage in England, and Ada’s father’s financial demise. Though these narrative “fillers” lend a sense of wholeness to the novel and its characters, the prologue’s disclaimer questions this authenticity. So, the claims of origin the film makes in gesturing to an “ur-text” are undermined by the supposed “ur-text” itself, suggesting that Campion simultaneously invokes the narrative of origin inherent in the novel even while she denies the novel as original. And yet, the existence and availability of rival texts such as the novel and the screenplay also work to destabilize claims of the film itself as “ur-text.” Not only does the recently published novel defer any claims the fi lm might make to being representative of the Victorian period, this deferral frustrates the fetishistic desire central to imperial nostalgia and its problematic identifications. In these ways, then, the film self-consciously comments on how attention to genre can reveal how the film (and its attendant texts) produces and undermines the desire for romantic fulfillment and imperial nostalgia via the appropriation of the indigene, specifically the indigene’s historical and genealogical relation to place. My reading of the film intervenes in this appropriation via the insertion of history. With the emergence of a contemporary “Pakeha” national identity seeking to distance itself from Britain’s imperial past, the translation from colonial settler to white nativist identity employs similarities with Maori cultural nationalism. Jane Campion’s fi lm defines a Pakeha nationalism that appropriates aspects of Maori nationalism vis-à-vis British imperialism in a fictionalized nineteenthcentury New Zealand/Aotearoa. Set in 1850 New Zealand, a decade after the signing of the Treaty, The Piano structures a system of representation which produces a sense of an imagined community, but with an important critical relation to this construction of identity. While the fi lm attempts to create a nationalist Pakeha identity through recuperating a fragmented past, it also foregrounds the problematics of such a project which depends upon the exclusion or repression of certain aspects of that past.

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The fi lm depicts three forms of difference which frustrate the nationalist wish for homogeneity: gender difference and sex roles, relations between settlers and indigenous Maori, and gapped and traumatic temporalities which evade linear, teleological national history. First, the fi lm focuses on woman as reproductive body. In general, nationalism’s valuation of women’s reproductivity and their roles as mothers and socializers within the nuclear family reproduces a malecentered nationalist ideology. Although the film has repeatedly been discussed as an account of sexual awakening, these readings ignore the threat implicit in Ada’s “erotic autonomy,” which subverts the “proper” nationalist avenues of reproduction such as legal marriage, the nuclear family, and monogamous sexual relations, thus challenging both British and Pakeha nationalism’s use of women’s bodies. Second, because this critical nationalism arises out of a former settler colony, a doubly complex relation to empire serves as the film’s basis for drawing similarities, while maintaining the differences, between settler Pakeha and indigenous Maori. Campion posits a Pakeha identity, through the figures of Ada McGrath and her subsequent “family” with George Baines and Flora, by means of an illusionary, constructed resemblance between Ada and the Maori characters.5 Further, the fi lm contrasts Ada’s use of so-called “natural” languages with the mediated and deceptive languages employed by the Treaty of Waitangi and the fi lmic Blue Beard shadow-play. The director’s self-conscious deployment of the shadow-play serves to suggest Ada’s problematic similarity to the fi lmic Maori both by establishing their mutually oppressed status under fraudulent legal contracts—such as Ada’s marriage and the Treaty—and by establishing “genealogical” linkages, parallel acts of visual witnessing, and the compatibility of their futures. Finally, while the fi lm links Ada and the Maori through these similarities, it also maintains their historical specificities by foregrounding Ada’s implicit difference from the Maori: her lack of ancestral, spiritual connection to the land. Ada’s gapped personal history, replete with its quasi-traumatic absences, is covered over by stories and tale-telling which give the illusion of actual historical events. Campion’s use of color and the piano as object enacts the fetishistic nature of Pakeha nationalism by showing how the translation from settler to Pakeha is predicated upon a willful “forgetting” of the colonial past. Like Flora’s and Ada’s tale-telling, the piano itself serves as the fetishistic site of loss which allows Ada to move toward an only partially whole future.

Woman, reproduction, and the nation The Piano is often categorized as a popular fi lm adaptation of nineteenth-century British romance novels such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. These readings emphasize Ada’s “sexual awakening.” For example, Ann Hardy argues that Ada is the typical romance heroine who spends a period of time with the “Wrong Man” only to be “understood and appreciated by a fully masculine, yet sensitive, nurturing male” who leads her to an

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“uninhibited expression of her own sensuality” (1994: 9).6 The Maori characters in the fi lm have also been read as peripheral, primitive, and crude caricatures.7 For Cheryl Smith and Leonie Pihama the Maori serve only “to decorate the stage of life” where Pakeha are the key romantic figures. Maori are constructed along “typically Eurocentric perceptions” which involve a child-like fondness for imitation and an inability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary (1993: 52). Indeed, the fi lm places Maori outside the bounds of civilization, equating the native with the untutored and unspoiled, with nature itself. An alternative to these romantic and primitivizing readings would be informed by an awareness of the relation between sex and the establishment of the nationstate, whether it be British empire represented by Alisdair Stewart or Pakeha nationalism represented by George Baines. The mid-1980s marked the beginning of a crisis in national identity for white New Zealanders who were forced to acknowledge their colonial history as a result of Maori demands for justice even while Britain turned away from the former loyalties of empire (Dyson 1995: 267). Britain’s entry into the European Community marked the end of New Zealand’s special economic ties to Britain which had guaranteed a market for primary produce. This economic shift, in addition to Maori demands for justice, “shattered the national ‘imaginings’ of white New Zealanders whose power and privilege [had] been challenged” from above and below the nation (270). The term “Pakeha” literally refers to “foreigners” or those of European ancestry. However, the term has increasingly been used to stake out a white ethnic identity which makes claims to indigeneity by appropriating traditional motifs and claiming spiritual attachments to the land (268–69). Linda Dyson argues that Ada and Baines refashion themselves as “born-again pakeha” through her sexual awakening and his “going native” (276). However, Campion self-consciously produces Ada as already sexually aware and “other”: Ada is inherently “indigenized,” her similarities with the Maori are already apparent when she leaves Scotland for her journey to New Zealand, suggesting a “natural” otherness that precedes cultural assimilation or social learning. These problematic “natural” similarities to the Maori are the basis for the Pakeha nationalism the fi lm critically constructs. An analysis of Ada’s sexual choice of Baines over Stewart will assist us in understanding the relation the fi lm draws between sex and the nation-state. Women within the nation-state are often valued for their reproductive and socializing roles, roles which in turn replicate nationalist ideology. One way in which women mediate between ethnic/national groupings and the state is by serving as biological reproducers of ethnic collectivities and thereby as reproducers of ethnic or national boundaries: “Women are controlled not only by being encouraged or discouraged from having children who will become members of the various ethnic groups within the state. They are also controlled in terms of the ‘proper’ way in which they should have them—i.e., in ways which will reproduce the boundaries of the symbolic identity of their group or that of their husbands” (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989: 9). Examples of these “proper” avenues include legal marriage, the nuclear family, and monogamous sexual relations. Ada’s sexuality destabilizes each of these categories.

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Campion suggests that Ada’s “marriage” to Stewart is primarily a contractual relation, one which emphasizes the “legality” of their arrangement rather than the spiritual and/or romantic aspects of marriage. That is, she has been married to Stewart through letters exchanged between two patriarchal figures: “Today he [Ada’s father] married me to a man I’ve not yet met. Soon my daughter and I shall join him in his own country. My husband says my muteness does not bother him. He writes and hark this: God loves dumb creatures, so why not he!” Apparently, the correspondence between Stewart and Ada’s father has effected an actual marriage: Ada refers to Stewart as “my husband” even before she has seen him, and when she lands on the beach in New Zealand, she is already wearing a gold wedding band. The association between Stewart and colonial, evangelical patriarchy is apparent when Ada describes New Zealand as “his own country” and when Stewart compares himself to God, thus echoing the kiwi phrase describing New Zealand as “God’s Own.” When Ada is being fitted with the faux wedding dress, a woman’s voice coldly attempts a consolation for the absence of a formal ceremony: “If you cannot have a ceremony together, you can at least have a photograph.” What is ironic in this scene is that the Reverend has been seen just previously chasing Nessie about the kitchen in the faux dress, suggesting that a ceremony for Ada and Stewart could easily be performed by him. The absence of the spiritual joining recalls a key premise of biculturalism, that Pakeha claims to land rely on a written contract, the Treaty of Waitangi, while Maori claims are based on a spiritual and ancestral relation. Indeed, Stewart is unable to comprehend the spiritual significance of land. When the Maori refuse to sell their ancestral lands, Stewart wonders, “What do they want it for? They don’t cultivate it, burn it back, anything. How do they even know it’s theirs?” As the Waitangi Tribunal and other venues demonstrate, Maori genealogy (whakapapa) and oral tradition articulate an ancestral connection to specific lands. From Stewart’s liberal perspective, legitimate ownership is demonstrated by taming the land (burning it back), production, and legal ownership—much like his approach to marriage. Ada’s sexuality, then, is defined not by sentiment or spiritual attachment, but by contractual relation. She shows her awareness of this when she tears off the wedding dress and spiritually “communes” with her piano, imagining it embattled and abandoned on the beach. Ada’s subsequent sexual involvement with Baines violates the nationalist constraint of monogamy, as well as a “legal” contract (marriage), thereby undermining the nuclear family and the legitimacy of Stewart’s possible future progeny through Ada. In other words, Ada violates the role of female reproducer prescribed by British nationalism and imperialism by means of what M. Jacqui Alexander has called “erotic autonomy,” a term which implies a threat to the stability of the nation. Erotic autonomy challenges “the ideological anchor of an originary nuclear family, a source of legitimation for the state, which perpetuates the fiction that the family is the cornerstone of society” (1997: 63) It represents a danger to the heterosexual family and to the nation: “[B]ecause loyalty to the nation as citizen is perennially colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality, erotic autonomy brings with it the potential of

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undoing the nation entirely, a possible charge of irresponsible citizenship or no citizenship at all” (63). As figures of erotic autonomy, the prostitute and lesbian are also outside the law and therefore “poised to be disciplined and punished within it” (64). We can see, then, how Baines’s giving the piano to Ada reveals him as a nationalist of sorts—for he, like Stewart, wants her to love him unpromiscuously and with no ulterior motive: “I am giving the piano back to you. I’ve had enough. The arrangement is making you a whore and me wretched. I want you to care for me, but you can’t.” In returning the piano, he reneges on their agreement that he will exchange the piano’s black keys for Ada’s visits and sexual favors. His “gift” of the piano is thus a form of discipline, a means of controlling the use of her sexuality in purely monogamous, romantic forms of expression.8 As Harvey Keitel says, Baines is “interested in the possibility of having a union, a family, a relationship” (Campion 1993a: 143). Ada’s relationship with the illiterate, lowerclass Baines threatens Stewart’s class status as well. Thus, both Stewart’s attempt to incarcerate Ada in his boarded-up home and his violent dismemberment of her index finger are attempts to circumscribe her autonomy, to rein her in to her bourgeois role as wife and mother to British subjects. Flora, Ada’s illegitimate child from a previous relationship, is another sign of Ada’s autonomy. Flora plays a central role in the film as Ada’s translator. Her very existence draws attention to Ada’s previous non-marital sexual relation to Flora’s father and indicates the impossibility of Ada, Flora, and Stewart constituting a nuclear family in the traditional sense, for Flora will never be Stewart’s child. She points this out when she tells her mother, “I’m not going to call him Papa, I’m not going to call him anything. I’m not even going to look at him!” In the wedding photograph scene, Flora waits sulkily, wanting to assert her existence as Ada’s lawful child, for the subject of the tale is Ada’s (nonexistent) marriage to Flora’s “real father.” She says to Morag, “My real father was a famous German composer . . . They met when my mother was an opera singer.” When Ada attempts to silence her, Flora responds sternly, “I want to be in the photograph!” As the next scene reveals, the photograph actually attempts to erase her historically from Ada’s life. Roland Barthes theorizes photographs in general as material emanations of a past reality. A photograph does not merely refer to the past but instead maintains a material connection to it. The photo authenticates the presence of that past: “I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (1981: 76). Barthes describes this link between the referent and the photograph in terms of the mother’s bodily connection to the child, an umbilical cord: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; . . . A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed” (80–81). However, unlike Barthes’ sincere reading of the photograph, Campion’s staged wedding photo of Ada and Stewart is entirely

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disingenuous, as Flora’s protest and story reveal. The stark contrast between the painted screen depicting an English landscape and the actual surroundings in the stormy New Zealand bush mark the photograph as very far from an emanation of an actual referent. The photograph is a record of a “sham” marriage, purely contractual and unconsummated, one which is eventually left ambiguous. We do not see annulment or divorce proceedings or even Ada’s marriage to Baines, and Baines’s marriage to a wife in “old England” apparently remains intact. The final scenes in Nelson, then, suggest that Ada’s and Baines’s relationship remains non-contractual, not circumscribed by marriage and the nuclear family (for Flora is not Baines’s daughter and serves as a constant reminder of her mother’s autonomy), even while they appear to be married and constituting a bourgeois nuclear family complete with house and white picket fence. This scene at their new home in Nelson points toward a key theme in the fi lm: the deceptive relation between surfaces and depths, image and reality, presence and absence.

Resemblances Although the fi lm has been read as a narrative of sexual awakening, Flora’s existence and Ada’s story of her relationship with Flora’s father suggest that Ada is already a sexual being before she lands on the beach in New Zealand. She is also already “other”: Ada’s muteness and her stunted physical appearance mark her, for Stewart, as odd. During their initial meeting on the beach, he speaks loudly and slowly, “CAN—YOU—HEAR—ME?” The screenplay describes Stewart as searching Ada’s face “for some sign of comprehension”; he is “unnerved by her lack of response” (1993a: 21).9 Later in the scene, after remarking, “You’re small. I never thought you’d be small,” he consults Baines, “What do you think?” But Stewart ignores Baines’s perceptive assessment that Ada looks tired, asserting, “She’s stunted, that’s one thing.” Morag and Nessie regard Ada’s piano playing, in evidence before her journey to New Zealand, as a sign of Ada’s inherent strangeness. Commenting on the fi lm score, composer Michael Nyman points out that Ada’s music is a “substitute for her voice”: “I had to establish not only a repertoire of music for the fi lm, but a repertoire of piano music that would have been Ada’s repertoire as a pianist, almost as if she had been the composer of it” (Campion 1993a: 150). Her music is not something one might learn, but a “talent.” Morag says of Ada, “She does not play the piano as we do, Nessie . . . No, she is a strange creature and her playing is strange, like a mood that passes into you. You cannot teach that, Nessie, one may like to learn, but that could not be taught . . . Your playing is plain and true and that is what I like. To have a sound creep inside you is not at all pleasant.” Morag here suggests a key distinction between talent and learned behavior, the natural and the tutored. This is not to say that Ada’s playing is untutored, for she does burst into a Chopin “Prelude”10 when she wishes to startle Baines and arrest his amorous advances. Nonetheless, the majority of her displayed repertoire is very much of her own making; in other words, she could very well be the medium of another composer’s music but chooses not to perform that function.

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Ada’s piano playing suggests an innate strangeness that echoes, indeed is symbiotic with, her other talent, her willed muteness.11 Her father calls her refusal to speak a “dark talent” (1993a: 9). Indeed, these two talents are linked in time, for her “mind’s voice” tells us that she has “not spoken since [she] was six years old,” and Stewart tells us that he has it in a letter—presumably from her father—that she has “been playing since she was five or six.” Both substitutes for speech—Ada’s personal sign language and her piano playing—are direct forms of communication as well as natural languages: they re-present by relying, not on words, but on the direct transmission of feeling. This is obvious in Holly Hunter’s vivid, direct, at times even poetic facial expressions and hand motions. Morag suggests this direct communication of feeling when she describes Ada’s playing as creeping inside her “like a mood that passes into you.” In this scene, the strangeness of the natural is made clear when Morag insists (“Up! Up!”) on being hidden behind a makeshift curtain as she executes a very natural habit in a “discreet toilet stop” (1993a: 91). The colonial women, Nessie and Morag, are frightened by a “fluttering sound in the bush” (92). The allusion to a bird is significant: later, Stewart refers to Ada as his “love bird” when he explains why he “clipped [her] wings.” Just as Morag is disturbed by Ada’s natural unlearned music, so is she unsettled by the pigeon’s natural sounds. Ada’s “dark talents,” her music and muteness, link her to another Other, George Baines, who has gone only partially native: his moko (tattoo) is incomplete, signalling his marginality to both the Maori and Pakeha. In an unfi lmed portion of the screenplay, Hira says to him, “Who do that? It not finish, that no good, Peini. You finish!” (1993a: 55). When Baines expresses his desire to trade the piano for land and lessons, Stewart teases him, “Well, Baines the music lover, I never would have guessed. Hidden talents, George.” But, of course, Baines’s real talent, which marks his alterity, lies in his ability to listen, to “read” Ada’s feelings, a quality which shows his similarity to Ada’s first lover. Flora, who translates for Ada, is not allowed in Baines’s “lessons,” for the piano becomes the medium of direct communication between them. As their relationship progresses, and their bodies meet in another, even more direct form of “natural”12 communication, the piano falls silent. Campion contrasts this direct natural language—which links the illiterate Baines with the mute musician Ada—with a more deceptive form based on verbal languages and the need for translation between languages.13 In the initial “contact” between Ada and Stewart on the beach a subtle evocation of this difference requires that we read in the margins. As Ada, through Flora’s translation, attempts to persuade Stewart that the piano must be borne with them, two Maori figures are positioned, one each behind Ada and Stewart. Stewart’s Maori mimic stands slightly behind and to the right of Stewart and copies him boldly; when another Maori teases Stewart, “Watch it, old dry balls is getting touchy!” the mimic cracks a smile and then resumes his shadowing of Stewart. Meanwhile, Ada’s “shadow” is placed far behind her and is shot somewhat out of focus. As he is fi lmed only from the neck down, we cannot see his facial expressions, but we can see that he is mimicking her hand gestures. One won-

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ders how this “shadow,” placed so far behind Ada, is able to discern and copy her quick fluid gestures. In this crucial scene the central action takes place in the margins, behind and around the central characters—Ada, Flora, Stewart, and the piano. One might argue that Ada and Stewart are being shadowed in the same way. However, the difference between them emphasizes the similarity between Ada and the Maori characters and their opposition to the colonizer, Stewart. The fi lm conveys this by distinguishing between mimicry and resemblance. According to Bhabha, mimicry is “at once resemblance and menace” (1994: 86). It disrupts the authority of colonial discourse and exposes that discourse’s ambivalence, the almost-but-not-quite, the demand for narcissistic representation and its resulting paranoia (88). Stewart’s Maori shadow engages boldly in mimicry. He resembles Stewart in that he wears European clothing and imitates Stewart’s facial expressions and gestures. Yet, he resists colonial authority, in the form of Stewart’s presumptuous employment of them as baggage carriers, by his evident enjoyment of the “old dry balls” comment. In contrast, Ada’s shadow, who is only peripherally present in the frame, seems to represent what Bhabha describes as “repetition of partial presence” or the metonymic presence (88) which Bhabha argues is the basis for mimicry. Ada’s shadow, however, does not seem to offer the ironic menace of mockery that is central to mimicry; rather, the resemblance between their hand gestures is more uncanny or magical than ironic. Indeed, in this scene, both of the Maori mimics are made to resemble Ada by their use of direct and natural expression: gesture. This distinction between mimicry and resemblance occurs precisely because Ada is unlike Stewart who is at this moment exerting his authority over Ada by informing her that the piano will not be borne with them. She is expressly presented—rather problematically—as having no colonial authority to exert. However, these resemblances are actually far from “natural” but rather circumstantial, constructed, and highly motivated as I show in the final section. Through the theatrical space of the Blue Beard shadow-play,14 Campion further emphasizes the deceptiveness of verbal language and its difference from the naturalness of gestures and music and their suggested connection to indigeneity. Most readings of the play-within-the-film assume that the Maori are unaware of theatrical conventions; this is the proffered reason for their “comedic” rushing onto the stage to save Nessie from her shadow-husband.15 These readings, however, ignore the fact that Chief Nihe is evidently well aware of these conventions: he says to his men, “Everything is fine, this is just a game” and “Hoki mai! Hoki mai!” (“Come back! Come back!”) (1993a: 66). How does one, then, read the actions of the two warriors who run onto the stage? What occurs here is a kind of literalization, or a breakdown of the difference between fictional/literary space (the play) and “reality”/lived space (the fi lm). In Andrew Lang’s translation of Charles Perrault’s “Blue Beard,” the female protagonist is saved from her murderous husband by her two warriorbrothers, “one a dragoon, the other a musketeer,” who pursue the cowering Blue Beard and run their swords through his body, leaving him dead (1889: 258). The

166 Making Pakeha history motif of the two brothers is repeated in the final, no longer comedic, enactment of the Blue Beard narrative when Stewart, having read Ada’s message to Baines, picks up his axe and moves down the hill toward his house. He is briefly followed by two Maori men aware of his bloody intentions. The dismemberment scene is tragic precisely because there are no warriors to protect Ada this time. This lack of parallelism between the story of Blue Beard and the events of the fi lm reveals the purely circumstantial nature of the similarities between Ada and the Maori and thereby reveals an important difference, namely that the proffered relation of siblingship is an imaginary one. In the shadow-play, the two warriors rush onto the stage yelling, “Coward bite on my club!” and “Let’s see how this feels up your arse!” In the screenplay, however, they yell, “Coward! Show yourself, come out!” (1993a: 66), implying the presence of the sheet behind which this portion of the play is being enacted. The central premise behind the play itself is the transition from the visible evidence of past violence—the bloodied heads of Blue Beard’s dead wives—to the implied (not literal) and impending violence behind the sheet— Blue Beard’s shadow decapitation of Nessie. When the two warriors yell out, “Show yourself, come out!” and when they tear down the sheets, poised to attack the “murderous” husband, their actions are predicated upon a kind of distrust, a belief that violence must be occurring behind the sheets.16 They are demanding that the communication of the event be re-presented directly through gesture, not mediated through the language of light, shadows, and sheets. The sheet, then, acts as a translator in that it translates physical action—the chopping motion of the axe—into a sign or representation of violence, one which is implicitly deceptive precisely because no actual violence is occurring. This is elaborated in the scene where the Reverend practices the chopping motion on Nessie’s hand. When he says to her, “Look you’re being attacked,” his shadow is shown saying, “And with the blood . . . it will be a good effect!” The Reverend’s shadow-figure with his angel’s wings is implicitly contrasted to the earlier Maori mimics who are more substantial than shadows in that their gestures are forms of direct communication, unmediated by light and shadows. How does one, then, account for the warriors’ assumption that violence is occurring behind the sheet? For this, I turn to the historical period in which the fi lm is set, the 1850s. By mid-century the tribes that would eventually be known as “the Maori” had experienced contact with Cook, the introduction of European diseases such as viral dysentery, influenza, whooping cough, measles, typhoid, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and related diseases such as phthisis, scrofula, and consumption (Belich 1996: 173). Campion notes the physical effects of contact; the screenplay describes the Maori characters as having “coughs, running noses and sores. (They have no immunity to European diseases.)” (1993a: 128). Furthermore, by 1850 many Maori had become unwilling and unwitting subjects of the Queen as a result of the deceptive Treaty of Waitangi. The combination of invisibility and fraud that pervaded these early interactions with the British is evident in accounts of the first contacts between Maori and Captain Cook. Te Horeta Taniwha, a Maori chief present when Cook visited Mercury

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Bay, described how white men were thought to be goblins and their ship a god. Taniwha, who had never before seen muskets, was astonished when “one of the goblins pointed a walking stick at a shad and amidst the thunder and lightning the bird fell down dead” (Sinclair 1969: 32–33). Cook’s own account of his first contact with Maori at Poverty Bay in October 1769 also indicates that musket fire was particularly disturbing to the Maori in that it was invisible and therefore inexplicable: [T]he Coxswain of the pinnace who had the charge of the Boats, seeing [the appearance of four Maori] fire’d two muskets over their heads, the first made them stop and look around them, but the 2d they took no notice of upon which a third was fired and killed one of them upon the spot just as he was going to dart his spear at the boat; at this the other three stood motionless for a minute or two, seemingly quite surprised wondering no doubt what it was that had just killed their commorade: but as soon as they recover’d themselves they made off dragging the dead body a little way and then left it. (1955: 169) An article about the Treaty of Waitangi appearing in The Bay of Islands Observer of July 7, 1842 suggests the role of fraud and invisibility in British usurpation of tribal sovereignty. In this article, the image of a cloak becomes a metaphor for the deceptive nature of translation: “‘the simple truth is, disguise it as we may, that under this cloak of benevolence, has been practised the greatest hypocrisy: to obtain possession of the country honestly, if possible, but nevertheless to obtain it’” (quoted in Orange 1996: 91). The Treaty was a translated text: there were at least two versions, the “original” in English and the “translation” in Maori.17 Sharp notes that the translation was a “fair but not literal reading” of the original (1997: 17). Differences in vocabulary and conceptual systems contributed to misunderstandings and allowed for the persuasiveness of fraudulent transaction: “it may be that the Maori version was designed to play down what [Maori] would lose and exaggerate what they would gain—that there was an element of British fraud or at least missionary over-enthusiasm in the whole transaction” can be “inferred” (17).18 In the fi lm, the Reverend’s enthusiasm about the “good effect” of the shadow-play is representative of this missionary zeal. In fact, the church’s production of the Blue Beard play reflects the extensive missionary involvement in the Treaty. Wesleyan missionaries were urged by their London headquarters to support William Hobson’s Treaty, and Bishop Broughton of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Sydney asked Henry Williams and his CMS colleagues “to influence the Maori people to surrender sovereignty” (Orange 1996: 38–39). Hobson expected missionary cooperation and received it in full. For example, although neither Williams nor his son Edward were experienced translators or experts in the Maori language, Hobson requested Williams to translate the Treaty, and it was Williams who substituted the Maori terms—tino rangatiratanga and kawanatanga—which were to become

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crucial to contemporary controversy over the documents. When Hobson attempted to secure more unanimous Maori agreement to the Treaty, he was often hosted by CMS and Wesleyan mission stations in the North Island. At Waimate, “[t]he strong missionary affiliation of Maori in this area greatly assisted Hobson in his mission” (60). Missionaries usually served also as translators between Hobson and Maori chiefs, a pattern that continued throughout most of the Treaty signings (61). The missionary influence added a religious aspect to Maori understanding of the agreement. Apparently, Williams was responsible for cultivating among Maori chiefs the idea that the Treaty was a “covenant,” an agreement that would unite Maori and Pakeha as one people, spiritually and temporally. In this covenant between Maori and the Queen, the latter was head of both the English Church and state and thus appeared comparable to Maori chiefs who could hold also the rank of tohunga or priest (90). This notion of the Treaty as fraudulent covenant parallels the film’s narration of Stewart’s and Ada’s marriage as well. The Treaty of Waitangi consists of three articles and a preamble, each of which contains a central problem in—depending on how one views it—translation or outright fraud. The English preamble states that Queen Victoria is anxious to protect the “Just Rights and Property” of the “Native Chiefs and Tribes” and to promote “Peace and Good Order” (Sharp 1997: 15). While the English version discusses rights and property, the Maori translation professes to protect tino rangatiratanga or “full, true chiefly authority,” suggesting that the Crown is more concerned about maintaining the chiefly structure of Maori society than emphasizing, as the British version seems to suggest, private ownership and individual rights (17). The contrast between the spiritual and liberal aspects of sovereignty—the one articulating connection to place, the other protection of land as property—is central to the differences between Ada and the Maori, differences which ultimately undermine claims of resemblance. In Article I of the English version, Maori chiefs agree to transfer sovereignty— which Britain claimed to protect in the preamble—to the Queen; however, in the translation, chiefs retain their sovereignty while conceding their kawanatanga or governorship. If one reads the Treaty as part of the palimpsest of the fi lm, one sees that in Ada’s contractual marriage to Stewart, she has unwittingly—since her father has arranged the marriage and all of its conditions—resigned her sovereignty to Stewart (who also represents empire) even though she may believe that she retains her sovereignty and has agreed only to be loosely governed by him. “Sovereignty,” in 1840 “legal English” means ”absolute and indivisible power to legislate, judge, and interpret the law; the absolute power to administer it, and to back up its requirements by force; the sole power to engage in foreign relations and thus to appoint and control diplomats and force of arms” (Sharp 1997: 17–18). There is no room in the British version for an “equal partnership.” This definition is fully borne out in Stewart’s behavior. He represents the law in that his disapproval of Flora’s trunk-hugging game, which he says has “shamed” the trunks, and his exacting a punishment—the scrubbing of them with soap—is uninformed by the factors motivating Flora’s behavior (i.e., Ada’s sexual rel-

Making Pakeha history 169 ationship with Baines). He warns Ada not to see Baines, incarcerates her, and with absolute and unregretting swift ness administers his law—he “clips” her wings by axing off her index finger. Stewart’s absolute and tyrannical power is emphasized by the fact that Ada has not literally disobeyed his rule that she not see Baines: she has not seen him, and Baines, as she is well aware, is illiterate and thus unable to read the message. In the fi lm, Baines does not see or receive Ada’s piano key on which she has inscribed her love for him. The angel’s wings which Flora wears when she delivers the key to Stewart high up on a hill, suggest that she is an angel delivering a message to the sacred sovereign, the God to whom Stewart compared himself earlier. Flora’s wings also imply her collusion with the missionaries who acted as biased intermediaries, aiding the ascension of a new worldly ruler masquerading as deity. “Kawanatanga,” the term used in the Maori translation, implies “governance” with “delegated and limited rights” which are “impersonal, unlimited in its law-making scope and not obviously sacred” (Sharp 1997: 8). Therefore, in Article I, the central difference between sovereignty and kawanatanga is that the former carries a sacred, god-like power associated with monarchical rule or chiefly status. In effect, the English version of the Treaty denies the spiritual and sacred connection between chiefs, their iwi, and the land, and installs another sovereign, the Crown, and its representative law, paralleled in the fi lm by Stewart. In Article II.1, Maori chiefs present and not present believed they were agreeing to retain their chiefly authority and ratou taonga katoa or “all things highly prized” (Sharp 1997: 17). However, II.1 of the British version allows Maori to retain “full and exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession” (16). Thus, while the Maori version promises that their prized objects are in no way threatened, the British version implies that Maori possession of their land and other taonga depends, more problematically, on “their wish and desire” to retain such items. “Wish” and “desire” are also crucial to the fi lm. Ada believes, upon entering the marriage, that she will be allowed to keep her piano; this is why she brings it with her to New Zealand. However, Stewart refuses to bear the piano from the beach and then trades it for Baines’s land without her permission and against her will. Ada emphasizes that she views the piano as her personal possession when she dashes her plate against the floor and writes, “THE PIANO IS MINE! IT’S MINE!” Stewart responds, “You can’t go on like this, we are a family now. All of us make sacrifices, and so will you!” His words and actions indicate that all individual possessions are now subsumed under the larger category of the family (and under his authority as father and husband), just as the Crown has positioned Maori “lands and Estates Forests Fisheries” under its purview by the mere fact of its granting Maori possession “so long as it is their wish and desire” (16). In fact, this detail shows how the Treaty was not a treaty at all since there was no neutral third party brokering an agreement between Maori and the British; rather, the document enabled the British underhandedly to assume the power to “grant” Maori possession of lands which had been within Maori control for thousands of years. But even as

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the contest over the piano reflects the translated version, the piano nevertheless remains for Ada, Stewart, and Baines, property (“THE PIANO IS MINE!”). As a contract, the Treaty (both versions) cannot but misrepresent Maori ancestral relation to the land. Terms such as “properties,” “possession,” and “things highly prized” show how the literate and contractual—like the shadow-play—betray lived reality. In II.2 of the British Treaty, the Queen claims “exclusive right of Preemption” over lands which the Maori wish to “alienate” (16). However, the Maori version promises the buying or selling (hokonga) of land, and no exclusive right is implied, nor is alienation mentioned (16–17). It is apparent that the Maori believed they were agreeing to sell or buy land while the British wanted exclusive right to turn the land irrevocably into part of the empire, not part of any other nation (European or otherwise), not even Maori or tribal land. In the fi lm, Stewart’s attempts to rape his wife can be read as claiming his “exclusive right” over her sexuality. He also grants himself ownership of the piano, selling it—and Ada herself—for Baines’s land. After this exchange has taken place, Ada must attempt to undo the process of “alienation” by bargaining with Baines, making visible parts of her body in exchange for parts of the piano (the black keys).19 The piano becomes hers only when the prospect of Baines’s love and spiritual connection make it impossible for him to continue the game. Finally, in Article III of the British version, the Queen guarantees to the chiefs her royal protection and the “Rights and Privileges of British Subjects” (16). This in itself is highly ironic and suspect, considering that at the time Britain already planned to settle New Zealand as a penal colony to be raised up out of the bush by convicts whom it had disowned as subjects and sent into exile. The Maori version of the Treaty recognized the governance of the Queen and granted the Maori “the same rights as the people of England” (Sharp 1997: 17), and thus placed Maori on a par with disowned, transported convicts and exiles—“people of England” who had no rights whatsoever in Britain! To return, then, to the question, “how might we account for the two Maori warriors who tear down the sheet in the Blue Beard shadow-play?” The shadowplay, like the Treaty of Waitangi and Ada’s marriage to Stewart, is deceptive precisely because it is a mediated or translated representation. The sheet allows the projection of shadow images which do not accurately reflect the action occurring behind it, just as the Maori version of the Treaty fraudulently misrepresents British intentions, and just as Ada has been led to believe falsely that her marriage to Stewart will allow her some control over her life, her body, and her possessions. In a scene not included in the fi lm, Baines, before leaving the bush, visits Chief Nihe’s Pa (fortified village). Hira voices her distress, sadness, and attachment to Baines: HIRA: Peini, I miss you, you are human like us. The pakeha man, they have no heart, they think only of land . . . I worry for us, Peini. Pakeha cunning like wind, KNOCK you over, yet you not see it. Some they say, “How can pakeha get our land if we won’t sell it?” . . . They wrong, Peini. Today our

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enamee he sell some land for heapah guns. Now, we too buy guns. We must sell our land to fight for our land. (Campion 1993a: 104–5) In this speech Hira evokes the invisible and deceptive nature of Pakeha transactions: the Pakeha man “KNOCK you over, yet you not see it” (105). Indeed, Maori did not see that the British were attempting to swindle them out of their sovereignty because there was nothing in the Maori version to see: the actual intent of the Treaty was hidden in the “honored’ text, the English version. The Maori warriors unmask Blue Beard’s shadow-play because their previous transactions with the British have been “bad” deals. Their behavior, then, is anything but an inability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. Ada’s marriage contract is also invisible to her; her mind’s voice tells us that her father has married her to a man she has “not yet met.” Like Ada and the Maori, Baines has also been cheated by Stewart, though willingly: he has exchanged 80 acres for a piano he does not play. In two scenes not included in the fi lm, Baines trades most of his worldly necessities—his shoes, hat, and gun—for Ada’s inscribed key which the Maori have managed to turn into an earring (105). In contrast to Baines, Stewart is most concerned with finding “good” deals, which invariably means cheating someone. The morning after the wedding photograph is taken, Stewart leaves his new bride for “some Maori land” he wants and “may buy very reasonably” (32). When Baines gives Ada the piano, Stewart suspects immediately that Ada has arranged to spoil his deal with Baines: “Hah, you’re very cunning, Ada, but I’ve seen through you, I’m not going to lose the land this way” (my italics). Not surprisingly, as he is a true imperialist, Stewart assumes she has planned to deceive him and invokes the sheet metaphor of the shadow-play. Stewart’s obsession that the land remain his is the sole concern in his dealings with Baines: “And what does this do to our bargain? I cannot afford the piano if you mean me to pay.” In the screenplay, Hira counsels Baines, who is left with an empty hut: “You make BIG mistake, George. In first place you should swap land for wife. Now look, she gone, you no land, no music box, you got nothing” (78). Stewart also gains his “good” bargains by “compensating” the Maori for their labor with useless trinkets and buttons. Stewart’s use of buttons as payment is evoked again on Ada’s first willing visit to Baines. While she undresses, Stewart watches as her buttons burst and scatter to the floor. Later, as she retrieves them, a button falls through a crack in the floor boards, dropping into Stewart’s shirt while he looks about, startled. This scene wryly pokes fun at Stewart’s “compensation” of the Maori piano bearers as well as his paying for a “peep show” involving his wife and Baines. In fact, one of the piano lessons in this fi lm involves not a piano but Stewart’s own sexual education. Campion comments: I have enjoyed writing characters who don’t have a twentieth-century sensibility about sex. They have nothing to prepare themselves for its strength and power . . . [T]he husband Stewart had probably never had sex at all. So

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Making Pakeha history for him to experience sex or feelings of sexual jealousy would have been personality-transforming. The impact of sex is not softened, it’s cleaner and extremer for that. (137–38)

The sexual awakening is Stewart’s, not Ada’s. Aside from Baines’s similarity to Ada and the Maori, familial connections between Ada and the Maori are subtly suggested during the unveiling of the shadow-play. In purely circumstantial terms, Ada and Stewart resemble the playcharacters Anne (played by Nessie) and Blue Beard: Ada’s life, like Anne’s, is threatened by her sexual curiosity which her husband himself had encouraged; Stewart is very much the vengeful husband whose own actions have led to Ada’s predicament with Baines. The two Maori warriors who save Anne–Nessie from Blue Beard’s axe are Ada’s metaphorical “brothers,” and she is their “sister,” for in most Blue Beard tales the unhappy young wife Anne is saved from her husband’s murderous intentions by her brothers who are also “warriors,” one a musketeer and the other a dragoon. The affirmation of family is also a central theme of Blue Beard tales in general.20 The film, then, self-consciously constructs a genealogical relation—constituted by historical circumstances and the gossamer web of fairy tales—between Pakeha women and Maori, a relation constituted by a shared history of oppression under empire. This familial relation actually recapitulates missionary rhetoric in the South Pacific and reveals Ada to be a settler. Missionaries in the South Pacific employed a “familial language” in addition to a simply gendered coding of feminization or hypermasculinization of the native. The notion that “the benighted heathens were children of missionaries” is pervasive in mission texts and in photographs which imply “a familial order and hierarchy.” Missionaries emphasized their “shared humanity” and “siblingship” with native peoples (Thomas 1997: 40). However, this siblingship is entirely different from the long and intimate spiritual relation between Maori and the land demonstrated in whakapapa (genealogy) which grounds contemporary land claims. If the Maori warriors are Ada’s metaphorical “brothers,” siblingship takes another turn—this time in the form of sisterly relation—as Ada’s muteness resembles the silence of two Christianized Maori women, Heni and Mary. When Stewart discusses Ada’s strange piano keyboard carved into the kitchen table, he says, “It’s strange, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not a piano, it doesn’t make any sound . . . I knew she was mute, but now I’m thinking it’s more than that. I’m wondering if she’s not brain-affected.” Meanwhile, Morag shushes Heni and Mary as they timidly sing “Got safe ah Quin” (129). In this scene their silenced condition mirrors Ada’s muteness. All three women are treated to some extent as if they are pets: as Morag gravely notes while Heni and Mary are seated on the floor badly mimicking the British anthem, “there is nothing so easy to like as a pet, and they are quite silent.”21 Ada’s most important similarity to the Maori is an echoing of the unveiling of the shadow-play and the warriors’ demand that the deception be exposed to their vision. After Ada’s finger has been severed by Stewart, he attempts to justify his actions, “I meant to love you. I just clipped your wing, that is all.” She, how-

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ever, is unconscious and unable to hear his confession. His explanation and his subsequent attempted rape of Ada occur while she remains unconscious, unable to see or stop him. It is significant that what literally “arrests” him is her gaze: “As he moves his body over her, he looks towards her, and to his shame and horror she is looking directly back at him, her eyes perfectly on his, perfectly focused” (1993a: 112). Like that of the Maori warriors, Ada’s gaze is an act of resistance; both are acts of witnessing, willful acts of seeing which prevent the deception from occurring. In Ada’s case, her gaze prevents the invisible consummation of her marriage and precludes the possibility that she will bear Stewart’s children. Her words, communicated almost telepathically (?) to Stewart, are the final manifestation of unmediated communication, for the message is transmitted directly from her mind to his. He tells Baines, as he touches his forehead, “She has spoken to me. I heard her voice. There was no sound, but I heard it here. Her voice was here in my head.” Her request that he free her is not unlike the contemporary Maori struggle to found a new Aotearoa where Maori might create a life independent of the Pakeha state by virtue of their being tangata whenua. According to Stewart, Ada’s voice tells him, “I am frightened of my will, of what it might do, it is so strange and strong . . . I have to go, let me go, let Baines take me away, let him try and save me.” However, what is most telling here about Ada’s constructed resemblance to Maori is the deceptive nature of both her mind’s voice and Stewart’s relaying of her message, for the audience—even though it has heard her mind’s voice in the opening and closing of the fi lm—is not allowed to hear this particular telepathic message to Stewart. We only hear his (re)statement of it to Baines. The possibility for deception is two-fold in that we are able neither to confirm whether or not Ada has indeed voiced anything to Stewart, nor to witness the content of Ada’s message, if any at all; and even if there were an actual communication, Stewart could have only told Baines what he wanted Ada to say. At the center of Ada’s “silent voice” is a troubling unconfirmability, even the possibility of an absence altogether. The resemblance between the contemporary construction of Pakeha identity through Ada and Maori struggles for justice in a bicultural New Zealand is reiterated in an earlier juxtaposition of scenes. Stewart’s first attempted rape of his wife occurs at the same moment that a group of Maori have entered his home and are playing the piano. Flora’s startled message interrupts Stewart’s attack, and he subsequently boards up the cabin to imprison Ada. It is Morag, however, who unwittingly points out the irony of the scene, for she assumes that Stewart has done this because of the catastrophic effect of the play—which represents the Treaty—on Maori–Pakeha relations: “Alisdair, is it because of our play? Have the natives aggressed you? . . . I have to say, you have done the wrong thing here, you see you have put the latch on the outside. When you close the door, it will be the Maori that lock you in, you see? With the latch on the outside you are quite trapped!” Stewart is caught in the difficult and impossible paradoxical predicament of keeping the Maori out and keeping Ada in. And, he is in this situation precisely because neither of them “want” him. The Maori refuse to sell him land because it is the burial ground of their tupuna, ancestors. Ada refuses

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to do “business” with him and eventually leaves him for a more sustaining relationship with Baines. Both Maori and Pakeha victims of empire’s violent will to power reject empire before it can abandon them in the contemporary situation. In the final resemblance between Ada and the Maori, their futures are shown to be compatible. As the piano is loaded onto the longboat, Baines and his Maori friends debate whether the piano will cause the canoe to capsize. Later, as the oarsmen transport them to Nelson, Ada signs to Flora who interprets for Baines, “She says, throw it overboard. She doesn’t want it. She says it’s spoiled.” Frustrated that Baines refuses to do as she wishes, Ada signs to a Maori oarsman to throw the piano over. In the first scene of actual interaction between Ada and a Maori character, he understands her signs—unmediated by Flora—and responds, “She’s right. It’s a coffin. Let the sea bury it.” Ada begins to undo the rigging. There is a shot from under the creaking boat as it tips and rocks dangerously in the water. Only then does Baines agree to throw it overboard. This scene posits the new bicultural New Zealand/Aotearoa. The piano, defi led and marked by the axe, represents the violent colonial past which must be submerged and officially forgotten if the two groups, Pakeha and Maori, are to live in the same land, if they are to survive the journey to Nelson. However, as the final scenes of Ada, Flora, and Baines’s happy domesticity in Nelson reveal, this projected intimacy with Maori is not maintained. Ensconced in their white cottage with its green lawn and white picket fence, the family seem to have no continued relations with Maori. In fact, they have hardly put their colonial past behind them for they are now part of one of the many encroaching settler colonies which later function to dispossess Maori. The white cottage is emblematic of nineteenth-century middle-class English-ness (Davidoff and Hall 1991: 361). When exported into the South Pacific, Michelle Elleray argues, it indicates the transformation of British colonial to settler (2004). The fi lm’s final scenes, then, suggest Pakeha-ness is founded upon a retreat toward a nostalgic bourgeois English-ness. Just as the unveiling of the shadow-play posits a genealogical and familial relation (siblingship) between the Maori and Ada, so the scene of Ada’s canoe voyage to Nelson elaborates how, in the writing of a settler national history, the Maori are figured as Ada’s relations who save her from the destructiveness of empire. It is precisely Campion’s deliberate evocation of artifice—the crossing of the stage threshhold, the circumstantial construction of relations between Maori and settler women—that points toward the constructedness of Pakeha history. The fi lm’s exposure of the actual differences between Ada and the Maori—differences which underlie these illusory similarities—enacts this self-consciousness about history as an interested story told for particular purposes.

Differences: history and the fetish In “The Making of the Piano” Campion discusses the absence of history for Pakeha New Zealanders and indicates how this absence contrasts with the Maori relation to history:

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I think that it’s a strange heritage I have as a pakeha New Zealander, and I wanted to be in a position to touch or explore that. In contrast to the original people in New Zealand, the Maori people, who have such an attachment to history, we seem to have no history, or at least not the same tradition. This makes you start to ask, “Well, who are my ancestors?” My ancestors were British colonizers—the people who came out like Ada and Stewart and Baines. (1993a: 135) She suggests how genealogical relation to the land—specifically the active recounting of one’s relation to place which grounds native identity—contrasts in quality to a history of settlement. Her words resonate with the excerpt of the Thomas Hood poem, “Sonnet: Silence,” quoted during the concluding scene of the fi lm, which shows Ada poised floating above her piano: There is a silence where hath been no sound There is a silence where no sound may be In the cold grave, under the deep deep sea. As in her “telepathic message” to Stewart, Ada’s voice here articulates silence and absence. The poem and Campion’s comments suggest that the Pakeha history conveyed to us by Ada is the silent space where no sound hath been and where no sound may be, for this silent space of history is the underwater grave in which the piano, now-coffin, is buried.22 To explain this connection, one must look to Campion’s use of an aesthetic language, the lighting and coloring of particular scenes.23 The underwater shot of Ada suspended above the piano has the blue-green tint that one would expect of such a scene. However, the uncanny resemblance of this coloring with the bluish-green forest scenes is deliberate on Campion’s part. The screenplay offers exact direction concerning how the bush should appear. Here is the description of the first scene in the bush, a shot of Baines, Stewart, and the Maori baggage carriers on their way to meet Ada on the beach: “Through a dense bush walk a party of fourteen MAORI MEN and WOMEN and two EUROPEAN MEN. The wetness, closeness and darkness of the bush is such that the air seems green, as at the bottom of a deep sea” (1993a: 17). Stuart Dryburgh, director of photography for the film, points out that the cinematography was inspired by a nineteenth-century colour stills process, the autochrome, which explains the use of “strong colour accents” to draw out the “blue-greens of the bush”: “Part of the director’s brief was that we would echo the fi lm’s element of underwater in the bush. ‘Bottom of the fish tank’ was the description we used for ourselves to help define what we were looking for. So we played it murky blue-green and let the skin tones sit down in amongst it” (Campion 1993a: 141). Ada’s entire violent marital experience with Stewart, her life in the bush, which is a fictional representation of Pakeha colonial history, is deposited in the form of the piano at the bottom of a silent sea. This is why Ada herself, in an act of metaphorical forgetting, follows the piano down to its watery grave. Stew-

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art, in his need to forget his experience with Ada, also desires that it take on the quality of a dream, a fiction.24 He confides to Baines, “I wish her gone. I wish you gone. I want to wake up and find that this was all a dream. That’s what I want.” When Ada, in the next scene, emerges from Stewart’s cabin, disheveled and injured, the blue-green light is absent from the bush, as if she is emerging from that underwater dream. The color blue is “the most insubstantial of colours; it seldom occurs in the natural world except as a translucency” such as “the void of the Heavens” and “the depths of the sea” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1996: 102). Blue also marks the boundary between the real and the imaginary: “It is the road to infinity on which the real is changed to the imaginary . . . To penetrate the blue is rather like Alice passing to the other side of the looking-glass. Light blue is the colour of meditation and, as it darkens naturally, it becomes the colour of dreams” (102). The fictional implication of the blue-green tint is also echoed in the source-tale “Blue Beard” where the blue tint to the character’s beard implies his “unnatural and magical qualities,” evidenced by his magical bloodstained key which reveals his wife’s guilt and seals her fate (Bettelheim 1975: 299). Campion’s use of color suggests, as does her comment on the absence of Pakeha history, her self-awareness about the constructedness of the narrative; the idea that the story told in the film is precisely a history which is a dream, a fiction, an imagined resemblance to the Maori, one which covers over the silence that is Pakeha history. For it is not settler history that is absent, but Pakeha history. In the transformation from colonizer to settler to Pakeha, a new story premised on a forgetting of a violent past must be told. The final shot of the piano—silent at the bottom of this deep sea of forgetting in which sound has never been nor ever may be—self-consciously displays the piano as the fetish that is historical narrative; it attempts to establish a direct and authentic connection between Pakeha and the land, a relation which does not actually exist, for Ada, as Campion points out, is an immigrant, while the Maori have an extended spiritual and ancestral connection to Aotearoa.25 Eric Santner defines “narrative fetishism” as “the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place” (1992: 144; my italics). Campion’s fi lm provides three embedded examples of narrative fetishism: the story of the piano as told by Ada’s mind’s voice (the film itself); Flora’s tale-telling; and Ada’s willful forgetting of the past. First, the story of the piano forms the basis for attempting to erase the absence of spiritual connection to the land through the creation of a romantic tale of a woman’s struggle and her resemblance to the indigenous people. It is important that the story allude to other British romance novels, for example Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, since Campion self-consciously refers to Ada’s story as a construction motivated by the desire to authenticate the indigenizing transformation from British settler to Pakeha. The violent nature of Ada and Stewart’s relationship is a result of this spiritual absence. In fact, the story of the piano is fi lled with absences and gaps which are covered over by various other stories. The cause of Ada’s muteness is never actually explained, though we are led to believe that her father views it as

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something she has a talent for and willfully chooses to exercise, a “dark talent,” which emerged, significantly, at the time she began to learn the piano. Ada’s muteness does not result from a physiological problem, because the film closes with Ada learning to speak. However, this is just one unanswered question in a script that is, as Holly Hunter notes, full of things “unexplained to the audience or even to the characters themselves” (Campion 1993a: 149). For example, Ada’s and Flora’s pasts are never fully revealed. The audience becomes privy to a portion of Flora’s father’s supposed story: that he was Ada’s music teacher, that she could “lay thoughts out in his mind like they were a sheet,” and that the pair did not marry because he “stopped listening” (51). But Ada’s use of the metaphor of the sheet which is an indirect form of communication and therefore deceptive— as the shadow-play’s similarity to the Treaty suggests—acknowledges that Ada’s mind’s voice, the story of the piano we are seeing (an image formed through light and shadow projected onto a sheet), is not entirely free of deception. Hence, Campion suggests that the tale being told in the film itself is also a construction, a deceptive fiction which covers over an absence of history. Second, while Ada’s mind’s voice deceptively covers over gaps in her personal history, Flora’s tale of her “REAL” father is also a fetish which attempts to hide two absences—the absence of her father and the lack of an explanation for Ada’s muteness—even while it refers to these absences and is motivated by it. Flora’s tale, which she calls “lies,” is an attempt to legitimize herself and Ada to Morag. Flora embroiders a romantic tale of an orchestra conductor who married Ada in “an enormous forest, with real fairies as bridesmaids each holding a little elf’s hand.” After noticing Morag’s skepticism, she confesses, “No, I tell a lie, it was in a small country church, near the mountains.” Of course, what is odd about this scene is that Flora was not yet born when these supposed events transpired, so she tells the story spurred on partly by Morag’s curiosity and partly by her own desire to be a legitimate daughter of a married couple, in spite of— or perhaps because of—the fact that she has been erased from Ada’s life in the photograph being taken at the precise moment when Flora tells her tale. Flora’s Scottish accent becomes “thick and expressive” (1993a: 31) as she tells the fantastic story of her mother and father singing a German opera duet and being struck dumb and dead, respectively, by lightning. Just as in the unveiling of the shadow-play, the fictional space of Flora’s tale merges with the actuality of Ada’s marriage to Stewart, for outside Ada and Stewart are having their wedding photograph taken in a forest while a storm rains down and lightning flashes. The uncanniness of the growing similarity between Flora’s tale and the surrounding events occurs because the fi lm suggests that her tale is highly motivated, as is Ada’s and Campion’s. In the screenplay, after Flora ends her tale with “Shenever-spoke-another-word,” the wedding party returns, “dripping wet, exactly as the couple in the story” (32). Tale-telling, here, is an incantation which produces a reality through its performance, for it is ultimately unclear whether Flora’s tale produces the reality or is produced by the situation in which she finds herself. Herein lies the significance of the cartoon image of a man catching fire, an image which draws attention to itself by its stark difference—its made-ness—from

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the fairly realistic shot sequence of Flora and Morag (and the wedding photo) which both suggest a record of events, rather than a constructed story.26 In other words, Flora’s performance of her tale and Morag’s belief in its truth produce an alternate reality. This scene, then, is a metaphor for the fi lm as a whole. It shows how the fi lm itself (like Flora’s tale) produces a false authenticity, a simulacrum; just as Flora was not present at her parents’ “marriage,” so Ada’s story—as told by her mind’s voice—is a contemporary construction of a historical image for which there is no actual referent. Furthermore, Campion’s reference to the nineteenth century through the fi lm’s evocation of the British romance novel and her publication of the novel after the fi lm’s release, point to the ways in which the fi lm draws attention to its made-ness “after the fact.” That is, the fi lm is a contemporary reconstruction of the mid-nineteenth century which attempts to authenticate as historical a contemporary Pakeha identity. Just as Flora’s tale persuades her audience that she is a legitimate child, so Ada’s mind’s voice (the film itself) constructs the illusion of historicity which is the fetish. The wedding photograph is ironic partly because it points to a historical contradiction: while the photograph was possible in 1850, the film could not have been. In this way, the fi lm undermines its own historicity and authenticity even as it evokes it through the genre of the Victorian period film. Like Flora’s and Ada’s past, Stewart’s and Baines’s personal histories are also absent, never actually given. We do know that Baines is married to a wife in “Old England.”27 Stewart’s background, however, is even more mysterious. Third, narrative fetishism is a kind of “refusal to mourn” in the wake of trauma or loss: “it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere” (Santner 1992: 144). Ada’s relation to Stewart is indeed violent if not traumatic, however, in her willful forgetting, that violent history of colonization is displaced onto the abandoned piano, thus allowing her to present herself as “made whole” through her healing relationship with Baines, her new piano, the return of speech, and the fetishistic completeness of her metal prosthesis. These absences in characters’ histories, however, are not necessarily traumatic, as Ada seems to remember her relationship with Flora’s father, and as the absence of Flora’s father does not technically constitute trauma for Flora since she was not yet born when he and Ada separated. The only possibly traumatic loss28 is Ada’s muteness about which she says, “No one knows why, not even me.” The fi lm’s use of these quasi-traumatic losses emphasizes the constructedness of the fetishistic narrative by undermining the psychological motivations for these narrative constructions and thus presents them as rather like willful acts of artifice. What kind of story, then, does The Piano tell? The fi lm constructs a story of a violent and unequal alliance-marriage, Ada’s rejection of that relationship—which is mirrored by the Maori rejection of the English version of the Treaty—and Ada’s final alliance with an indigenized Pakeha.29 A new community is formed on the voyage to Nelson, one which seems to honor—through Ada and Baines’s departure from the bush—the Maori right to prior occupation of certain lands, their ancestral and spiritual relation to the land, even while it

Making Pakeha history

179

refers to a fictionalized and constructed Pakeha historical relation that hides or disguises the absence of such a relation. This new Pakeha constructed history is a fetish that covers over an actual absence of long and intimate connection to the land. The title “The Piano” is thus significant because the fi lm is about the fetishistic construction of historical narrative which the piano enacts, for the piano itself functions as substitute for imagined “losses” which are actual absences. The piano substitutes for Ada’s absent speech, for her absent indigeneity, even while her muteness and direct communication link her to the native-ness she never “possessed.” In the now-famous piano-dusting scene, the piano substitutes for Ada herself. Finally, the piano stands in for the absent historical relation to the land, as the violent story brought about by that absent relation, the story of Ada and Stewart’s sham marriage, is tossed overboard, forgotten, and made silent. However, this past is not completely forgotten, for Ada admits that at night, just before dropping off to sleep, she thinks of her piano “in its ocean grave and sometimes of [her]self floating above it” (1993a: 122). The violent colonial past then must be “buried” in order for Ada to live, but it is not completely forgotten: it becomes the terrible unconscious of the new Pakeha nation founded upon the distantiation and partial forgetting of a shared past with empire. Ada’s choice to be buried with the piano is necessary in order for her to be reborn as a Pakeha, for she must attempt to forget and bury the settler past, and her possible complicity in it, if she is to envision herself as part of the new post-imperial and bicultural New Zealand. And yet, this memory as well as the persistent tapping of her metal prosthesis are constant reminders of the fetishistic nature of Pakeha identity and its nostalgic relation to the imperial past. The new family she forms with Baines and Flora in Nelson points to the possibility of a critical perspective on nationalist subjectivity, an alternative to one defined by contractual marriage, the nuclear family, and the monogamous imperatives of the nation, even while this new family also asserts its apparent affinities with British nationalism through its resemblance to traditional western marital and familial relations. But the fi lm’s critique of Pakeha identity falls short when we observe its inability to move beyond the settler past or to note the family’s complicity in the settlement of Nelson. We might discern two kinds of postcoloniality in the fi lm. The first, represented in Ada’s freedom from Stewart, is an actual postcoloniality, the settler colony’s formal independence from the imperial center which occurs mid-century. The second more contemporary postcoloniality—reconciliation, biculturalism, and sovereignty—is one that the film conveniently abandons. For all their camaraderie with the Maori, Ada and Baines become settler colonialists who inhabit a further remove, a further alienation from engagement with the politics of settlement and Maori land claims. In this way, their lives in Nelson suggest a refusal to engage substantively with the contemporary questions of reconciliation and equal partnership set forth in the Treaty. Despite the historical parallels the fi lm sets up between mid-nineteenth-century and contemporary New Zealand, its ultimate retreat into its claim as period fi lm provides a convenient alibi for not having to engage with the problematic nature of white settler privilege in the contemporary moment.

Epilogue

Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Whale Rider (1987)—thanks to the 2003 film adaptation by Niki Caro—is known to most audiences as the story of a Maori girl’s heroic rescuing of her tribe from the brink of cultural malaise. This postCold War adaptation, however, conveniently forgets the threat of nuclear annihilation—and the sense of interrelatedness which underlies Pacific Islander opposition to nuclear testing. In the novel, the tribe’s existence—and flourishing—is intimately connected to other parts of Oceania. The ocean itself connects Kahu’s iwi not only to diasporic Maori in Australia, but to independence movements in Tahiti and Papua New Guinea, and to the larger pan-Oceanic opposition to nuclear testing in the Pacific. These Oceanic and genealogical connections to Tahiti through migration to Aotearoa on the back of the ancient whale are precisely the means by which Ihimaera’s novel imagines a decolonized Pacific. Relationality is central to Oceanic indigeneity. This book has traced the specificity of genealogical connections, experiences of contact and colonization, and modes of decolonization across three archipelagoes. I have examined a range of complex relationships, from the multiple colonizations and racial divisions of Holt’s multiple dialectics; to the entangled pasts of boy convicts, evangelicals, and chiefly Maori; to Samoan culture’s accommodation of western capitalism and Christianity; to the relations between indigene and white settlers; and the complexity of alliances between natives and non-native locals against U.S. empire and multinational capital. In each instance, indigeneity is constituted in relation to an astonishing array of colonial and neocolonial presences. In this way, they are impure—as are the fictions themselves which transform the already reformulated fictions of other postcolonial writers while maintaining a deep sensitivity and groundedness in place-specific epistemologies and life ways. Place in these texts is evident both in residual traumas of colonization and in indigenous genealogical articulations. The processes of decolonization to which these texts contribute engage (rather than efface) the traumatic pasts of colonialism while also reinvoking indigenous cultural forms as the foundation for imagining new futures. In each example, trauma has been central to imagining the nation, its histories, narratives forms, and subjects. Specifically, the performative language of the law elicits the trauma at the heart of colonial subjection. The legal definitions of native Hawaiian under

Epilogue 181 the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act invoke the trauma—ethnographic and otherwise—of contact, dispossession, and legislated genocide. The law disciplines subsistence practices and indigenous existence on the land, working to unmoor that relation by producing the liberal subject and surplus production. The criminalization of native practices accompanies the criminalization of resistance—whether it be native resistance movements, subsistence living, or rebellion within the metropole. For the peculiar entangled relations in Aotearoa result from settlement aided by convict labor and its spiritual counterpart, evangelical reform. So, the law is productive of contradictory colonial relations. This is true as well of Maori relation to the Treaty of Waitangi, a deception which Campion’s film self-consciously appropriates in the service of the Pakeha nation. And it also accounts for the racialized division which troubles alliances between natives and immigrant laborers in Hawai‘i. The trauma of contact extends to the commodification and alienation of both land and women, diminishing the cosmogonic role of women in indigenous relations to land. Even reproduction itself is placed under the sign of capital. Establishing new gender roles—feminine and masculine—that move through this history are one means to decolonizing the land itself. These traumatic dispossessions re-emerge—either as part of nation-formation in magic realism or as part of ongoing colonialism in traumatic realism— precisely because native practices have existed alongside and in spite of the delegitimating imperatives of the law and modernity. Visions, skin signs, and ancestors re-emerge as guides to the reclamation of sovereignty. Storytelling, genealogy, and the fāgogo work to legitimate the postcolonial nation through genealogical grafting. Unofficial oral/aural languages such as pidgin provide a language of consciousness that grounds resistance, while other oral forms indicate a flexible, living genealogy which constitutes a mode of belonging that exceeds the nation. The abiding significance of genealogy, though, has been the most crucial in these decolonizing imaginaries, working to contest the imposition of western discourses. Deep genealogical connections to place challenge the genocidal imperatives of racializing laws such as the HHCA. Long-lived ancestral connections to land undermine the discursive claims of legal contracts such as the Treaty of Waitangi. Where history and psychology offer only explanation and further trauma, genealogy offers a dynamic cure for the traumas of entanglement. And yet, genealogy itself does not necessarily inhabit a space beyond the discursive. As Wendt and Campion show, the genealogy of resistance is as appropriatable as any other mode of legitimation. But the issues of indigeneity, nation, and orality explored here can be extended to a range of other texts. The Hawaiian oral traditions of oli and mele are present in Haunani-Kay Trask’s poetry A Light from the Crevice Never Seen and Night Is a Sharkskin Drum. Sia Figiel’s The Girl in the Moon Circle, has been influenced by the fāgogo and solo (poetry) as well as oral performance traditions. The role of pidgin English in local resistance is key to a range of local Hawai‘i writers, including Joseph P. Balaz, Milton Murayama, Rodney Morales, Lisa Linn Kanae, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. The power of oral testimony and witnessing structures Patricia Grace’s novels. Morales’ When the Shark Bites records the personal stories

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of members of the Protect Kaho‘olawe Ohana in the aftermath of the disappearance of their leader, George Helm, Jr. The power of the oral in transforming the colonized reality is central to Hulme’s haunting collection, Te Kaihau/The Windeater. Her fantastical short stories, poems, and even a screenplay function as incantations and rituals which unsettle naturalized Pakeha claims to land. Likewise, performances by Hālau o Kekuhi, led by Kumu Hula Pualani Kanahele and Nalani Kanaka‘ole, of the Pele-Hi‘iaka cycle Holo Mai Pele and Kamehameha: Nā Hō‘ailona were significant moments in the revival of traditional Hawaiian chant and hula. They demonstrated the performative power of genealogy in bringing about a transformed future. The complex nature of genealogy, its unification of human and non-human realms, is central to the ancient cosmogonic chant Kumulipo and contemporary novels such as Ihimaera’s Whale Rider and The Matriarch, and Grace’s Potiki. More recently, biopiracy and threats to biodiversity constitute a violence to genealogy, the web of relations which account for one’s existence in the world. In this regard, Grace’s Baby No-Eyes is a visionary text which links the issues of biopiracy and land. In the post-claims period in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the dynamics of intratribal politics become increasingly more important. Grace’s Dogside Story details a Maori community’s efforts to manage economic and social inequities within forms of tribal governance. Cinematic images of indigenous peoples broached in The Piano, today take on different cultural politics influenced by globalization and new developments in tribal sovereignty. In fi lms such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, warrior Orcs, the Uruk-hai, were often played by Maori actors. Do these images popularize the stereotype of Maori cannibal sporting a top-knot? Should these appropriations be seen as gross misrepresentations, or signs of empowerment and access to the image-making power of international fi lm? What does one make of this delinking of images from referent as they enter global image markets? Texts written in the native languages emerging from Hawai‘i and Aotearoa—native language newspapers, poetry, fiction, dance, and music—also require attention—though perhaps along quite different strategies than those explored here.

Oppositional reading: decolonizing praxis In the introduction to this book, I broached a methodology for reading with a “side-glancing historical eye,” a mode of reading that attended to the intertextuality of literature and its engagement with other discourses. Allow me to end by articulating the stakes of this methodology for decolonization, its role in producing oppositional subjectivity. In contrast to resistance (revolution or protest), opposition is covert, disguised, and duplicitous. Working from within systems of power, it evades identification and discipline (Chambers 1991: 203).1 Unlike resistance which seeks the reversal of power relations—and which thereby reinscribes the system of power—opposition allows the disempowered to survive within the system by maintaining a sense of dignity and personhood (1–7).

Epilogue 183 Oppositional narrative has the potential to radically and non-violently change readers from the inside by producing shifts in desire. And, here, popular and oral modes are crucial. In typical oppositional narratives, the storyteller seduces the reader/hearer into perceiving from an oppositional point of view. In doing so, the reader herself becomes a witness.2 Oppositional narratives are forms of truthtelling, testimony from one who has witnessed and survived life under oppressive conditions. The storyteller/witness takes upon himself the “responsibility of making a truthful report,” short-circuiting the regime which controls circulation and representation (16). In previous chapters, the so-called fictive texts function as forms of witnessing, bringing to the surface events repressed in imperial or postcolonial history, transforming the reader into a witness, one who can see the validity of anti-colonial struggle. But it is only through a reading praxis that crosses the boundary between history and fiction that this witnessing is produced. As well, these narratives caution the reader about the nation’s appropriation of oppositional narratives into ones that replicate state and imperial power. Oppositional narratives also challenge the reader—especially if located in the metropole—to recognize his/her complicity in imperialism and neocolonialism. The overwhelming success of magic realist novels with metropolitan readers suggests that some sort of “seduction” is occurring. Instead of arguing, as Timothy Brennan (1989) does, that magic realist texts patently avoid discussion of anti-colonial nationalism, might it not also be true that these novels fascinate metropolitan readers precisely because they speak to them on the level of what has been repressed in the representations of these locations by metropolitan media? If some magic realist texts maintain a kind of cultural capital within the nexus of metropolitan publishers and readers, the works presented here may not be absorbed within this network of distribution and readership precisely because they resist the expectations of western-trained readers and Eurocentric epistemologies. Not only is psychological disclosure forestalled through the texts’ traumatic structures, these texts rely upon indigenous modes of knowing, residual histories, multiple points of indigenous origin, and everyday practices which challenge and threaten to dismantle the scientific, discursive structures of knowledge production. In places such as Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Aotearoa, the reality of indigenous people has not registered in the metropole except through films which exoticize and reinscribe stereotypes of the “native” (for example, Once Were Warriors, or The Piano). The works in this study offer the possibility of non-fetishizing perspectives of both colonial resistance and touristic depictions of the Pacific Islands and thereby present a critique of cultural nationalism in these spaces as well as oppositional forms of witnessing in the metropole. This is particularly powerful for places yet to achieve some form of sovereignty, if not independence, as witnessing in the metropole becomes one of the means by which issues of indigenous sovereignty can be understood and politicized. Histories of colonization are crucial for linking popular struggles in sites as remote and historically, culturally different as Latin America, Hawai‘i, Western Samoa, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, sites which are connected invisibly by

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Asia-Pacific or “Pacific Rim” corporate decisions and global market discipline as well as to insurgent movements and popular resistances. The aesthetics of magic realism is one way that these varied experiences of marginalization and belittlement—not exclusive to this late stage of capitalism—can reveal the nation-state’s complicity with multinationals and also make connections between local and indigenous struggles for self-determination. It is particularly crucial that such linkages occur in the Pacific region precisely because the jockeying for control over the region prior to and during World War II has proved to be so crucial for defining the global political economy today. But the relation of indigenous peoples to these evolving local connections is complicated by the contrasting interests of diasporics and migrants. While international alliances between postcolonial nations and migrant peoples rely on the appropriation of the aims and circuits of global capital, indigenous connections to land and traditional life ways are often directly and adversely affected by both globalization and inmigration. For indigenous people such as Maori and Native Hawaiians who are still struggling for autonomy, multinationals and their control over land, the environment, and public policy greatly affect the practice of traditional culture. Global capital has everything to do with whether and how these colonizing nations (the U.S. and New Zealand, for example) recognize the sovereign rights of these indigenous groups. While critics such as Edward Said, Benita Parry, Ania Loomba, and Aijaz Ahmad have argued that discursive accounts of resistance do not actually constitute resistance per se, historical recuperation of resistance events does have a crucial role in the success of sovereignty movements. Texts such as C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins stimulated and aided decolonization projects in Africa and the Caribbean (Needham 2000). Likewise, in Hawai‘i, the historical work of Noenoe K. Silva, Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa, Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, and Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman strengthen the claims of sovereignty movements.3 As Silva explains, Native Hawaiians suffer from “the erasure of their pasts”: Our ancestors, save the monarchs, are absent from our history books, though they haunt the pages in hints and footnotes. As a Kānaka Maoli who reads our ancestors’ writings in their own language, I am constantly astounded at how their stories differ from the history books, and grieve that we do not know those who fought to save their country from annexation, while we can recite names like Dole, Thurston, and Stevens. So I tell the Kānaka Maoli story, quoting them at length because their words remained locked away for so long. Today, as we recover our sovereignty, we need to know how eloquent, angry, and committed these men and women were, how they succeeded and how they failed. We have so much to be proud of in our past; I seek to make a little more of it known. (1999: 8)

Epilogue 185 The previous chapters reference specific historical moments of resistance, requiring us to read differently—with a side-glancing historical eye. This very process of reading asks that we also become witnesses to these events, witnesses who also must see the need for social change in the places where we live and the places we are connected to by capital. Understanding these specific histories allows us to resist in some ways the global propensity to erase local specificity. These authors engage in alternative historiography, recuperating events gone unnoticed in official accounts that are being challenged increasingly by indigenous anti-colonial nationalisms. Not only are stories of resistance empowering and necessary for the efficacy of political struggle, learning to read them offers one means to bring about a truly decolonized reality.

Notes

Introduction 1 See Diaz 2001. 2 However, the studies of migration central to establishing Pacific Studies also marginalized areas of Melanesia and Micronesia. 3 See also Wilson 2000: 130–1. 4 See Lili‘uokalani 1964, Appendix. 5 For a reading of Balaz in terms of the routedness of diasporic locals, see Kido 1999. 6 Increasingly in Hawai‘i, the term “Kānaka Maoli” is being used to designate those of Native Hawaiian ancestry. The reinvigoration of this term coincides with the urgent calls for indigenous sovereignty there. See Blaisdell 2000. 7 A further irony of the term “mainland” is how it reveals the hierarchization of colonized locations within the Pacific. Carolinians consider Guam the mainland, and those from Guam see Hawai‘i as a mainland, a stopping-off point before moving on to the continent. I am indebted to Vicente Diaz for this insight. 8 See Sanchez 2000. 9 See Gilroy 1995; Gikandi 1992 and 1996. 10 See Teaiwa 2001. 11 See Lili‘uokalani 1964, chapters 22–28. 12 See Firth 2000. While Firth’s distinctions between settler and nonsettler societies are useful, his article makes rather dark predictions about the futures of indigenous sovereignty movements. For example, he predicted that the 1995 riots against nuclear testing in French Polynesia would weaken the appeal of the Tavini Huiraatira in territorial elections. This has recently been disproved by the election of opposition leader Oscar Temaru as President of French Polynesia—for a second time. Firth’s article also does not account for the complexity of settler societies, for alliances between natives and non-natives that challenge liberal paradigms. 13 Trask defines as “Hawaiian” people of indigenous Hawaiian descent, a definition which excludes all non-indigenous, though native-born, persons such as whites, descendants of immigrant laborers, and all recent arrivals. They are “foreigners,” whose sensibilities do not derive from “the land,” who cannot claim prior right to land based on aboriginal occupation, and who cannot claim the history of Hawai‘i as their own (1993). 14 See Trask 1993; Stannard 1989; Kame‘eleihiwa 1992; Dening 1980. 15 See Grace 1998a. 16 See Hau‘ofa 1995b. 17 “Popular nationalism” as defined by T. Brennan is a “collective political identity” which moves beyond the nation-state model in order to transform conditions of dependency (1989: 20). Cheah shows how nationalist movements in the periphery

Notes

18

19

20 21 22

23 24

25

26

27

187

are responses to heightened globalization and an important means toward social redistribution (1998a; 1998b). Popular nationalism acts prior to a revolution that claims the state for official nationalism. See also Lloyd and Lowe 1997. European and American skepticism about the nation in the late twentieth century responds to fascist regimes which led many to conclude that nationalism was rooted ultimately in barbarism. In the developing world, however, nationalism should be seen as a response to its more imperial form as well as to U.S. exportation of authoritarian military regimes to the Third World (T. Brennan 1989: 18–19). Rothberg (2000) defines “traumatic realism” as central to representation of Holocaust history. Realism documents, modernism questions transparent representations, and postmodernism characterizes the circulation of that history. My definition of the term, while it engages aspects of genocide, explores the relevance of trauma to colonial and postcolonial subjectivity. The traumatizing events of colonialism are ongoing, not foreclosed as in the case of the Holocaust. Foster defines “traumatic realism” in relation to Andy Warhol’s visual repetition of traumatic events which challenges the Freudian narrative of psychic integration. Repetition not only wards off trauma—representing that which under trauma cannot be represented—but it also produces trauma (1996: 32). For a more detailed examination of this larger field of Pacific literature, see my “Decolonizing Pacific literatures in English,” forthcoming. See, for example, Fanon 1963 and 1967; Memmi 1967; Nandy 1983; Bhabha 1994. Transit and groundedness are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The emergence of Native Pacific Cultural Studies takes as its premise the rootedness and routedness of native identity. See Diaz and Kauanui 2001. Though my work is consonant with this project, I explore the ways in which struggles over land and its meanings as well as the traumatic history of colonization provide yet another site for delving into the complexity of indigenous nationalisms. Bhabha 1992, 1994, 1996; Stratton and Ang 1996. Eurocentric notions of the nation often ignore the importance of spiritual connection to the land which indigenous peoples value. In the case of U.S. First Nations people, “tribal bonding with geography” is “the most persistent native nationalistic sentiment . . . often dismissed as a major criterion for nationhood in the modern world.” In indigenous views of the world, origins, language, and mythology are inseparable from place (Cook-Lynn 1993: 31). While the law “fi xes” land as property, other discourses challenge this transformation (Merry 2003). Contemporary deployments of the law by indigenous peoples at home and at international fora are other means for obtaining social justice and on a limited scale for transforming colonial relations to land. See Merry 2003, Povinelli 2002, Osorio 2003, Riles 2003, H. Trask 1993, M. Trask 2000. See Osorio 2002 for highly nuanced discussion of how Hawaiians made Anglo-American law their own during the nineteenth century. For my purposes, I focus on colonial law under formal colonialism, which I distinguish as historically different from post-independence legal structures and human rights advocacy. See Mamdani 1996; and Merry 2000, 2003. For critiques of liberal democracy as part of settler colonialism and imperial project, see Grimshaw et al. 2001, Fitzpatrick 2001, Parsonson 2001, Jowitt 2003, Collier 2003. For discussion of how western law conflicts with custom in the post-independence Pacific, see Hassall 2003, Fraser 2003, Collier 2003. Jonathan Osorio eloquently calls for the sovereignty movement to “construct a different society than the one we presently occupy.” He asks, “Otherwise, what is the point of spending one’s life in pursuit of Lāhui rather than simply looking for ways to make wealth?” (2003: 232). For a discussion of how colonial laws discipline gendered and sexualized bodies, see Merry 2000.

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28 See Povinelli 2002. 29 See Stratton and Ang 1996; Coombes 1994. 30 However, hybrid subjectivity is not structured solely along the colonizer–colonized binary; rather, Thomas has critiqued how postcolonial theory often clashes with the agendas of indigenous political actors because it “overestimate[s] the efficacy and reach of colonial discourses.” The assumption that the colonizer–colonized relation specifies “the whole range of indigenous identity or self-consciousness” discounts other structuring relations (1997: 11). This project explores how multiple binaries and non-binaries—such as the entangled histories of indigenous and other non-white settler groups, or comparisons between different indigenous groups—are central to this relational notion of indigeneity. 31 See Linnekin 1983; Tobin 1995. 32 Leys (2000) takes issue with Caruth’s privileging of the “literal” return of the original event. Unlike the examples of sexual abuse which Leys focuses on, the events I discuss are indeed verifiable, being large-scale historical and social realities. Their occurrence is not in question. 33 See García Márquez 1982. 34 García Márquez has denied the accuracy of the term “magic realism,” affirming instead the reality his novels refer to: “You can take my books and I can tell you line for line what part of reality or what episode it came from . . . I promise you, I invent nothing either in journalism or fiction” (1988: 23). Despite this disavowal, the term continues to be used in contemporary literary criticism and retains wide popularity among readers of fiction. My objective is to define a more rigorous and enabling aesthetic practice within the many forms of magic realism. 35 Why employ a non-Pacific aesthetic theory? The authors included are themselves in part “products” of the “west” and their own interests in non-Pacific indigenous resistance as much as they are of their native cultures. Th is is the crux of the attempt to deal with the effects of colonization, namely hybridity itself. 36 See Cook-Lynn 1993. 37 Connery (1995) defines “the Pacific Rim” as a “dominant in the U.S. geo-imaginary” crucial to imagining U.S. multinational capitalism during the Cold War. It includes the U.S., Canada, Mexico (which is often left out), Japan, China, the Four Tigers (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore), Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Dirlik (1992) traces the term “Asia-Pacific” to the post-Cold War geopolitical imaginary in which EuroAmerican powers (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, Britain and the U.S.) invested in a regional structure of “boundless markets” and “ever-expanding investments” (Wilson and Dirlik 1995: 2). 38 Cheah calls for activist cosmopolitanisms and local struggles to come together within the North outside of defensive identity politics (1998b: 37–38). 39 This is not to exclude realist texts in the depiction of outsized reality. Rather, for all its seeming distance from realistic representation, magic realism is merely one possible mode for representing and acknowledging the fantastical aspects of reality. 40 See also Sahlins’ discussion of Hone Heke’s rebellion (1985: 65). 41 The more mythical texture of this residue in Hulme contrasts with Holt’s more humanized, epic sense. Sahlins explains the difference between Maori and Hawaiian cosmologies in terms of difference between myth and historical epic (1981: 14). 42 See also chapter 3 on Hulme. 43 I am indebted to Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman for these insights into Hawaiian genealogy. 44 See Frow 1986: 234. 45 Though the study of the Pacific has been well established in the disciplines of history, anthropology, biology, and linguistics, the study of its literatures has only begun to come into its own. 46 Since 2001, various versions of the Akaka Bill (which would establish a nation-

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within-a-nation relation with the U.S. similar to that held by Native American tribes) have come before Congress, none passing into law. It is also regarded as controversial by many sovereignty groups since it could bar independence in the future. The bill has not been placed before an open referendum of the Hawaiian people. 1 Trauma and the construction of race in John Dominis Holt’s Waimea Summer 1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Najita 2001a. 2 I am indebted to Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman for her knowledge of genealogical practices. 3 “Paniolo” is Hawaiian for “cowboy.” It refers to the particular tradition that resulted from nineteenth-century importation of vaqueros to Hawai‘i from North America. 4 In the 1930s Parker Ranch had cattle swim out to whaleboats to which their heads were then tied. They were taken to a freight ship and lifted by a belly sling into the steamer (Brennan 1974: 147). 5 Sumida 1991 reads Holt’s novel as the city boy’s search for the stability and timelessness of the pastoral, through a “dead” history distilled in some distant and romanticized past. However, the protagonist is much more psychologically tormented than the protagonist of Sumida’s pastoral reading, as my analysis shows. 6 “Ho‘omana” literally means to “place in authority, empower” or “to worship” (Pukui and Elbert 1986). 7 “Ku-wo” means “to howl” or “cry loudly, as with joy or pain.” “Kanikau” is a “dirge, lamentation, chant of mourning; to chant, wail” (Pukui and Elbert 1986). 8 Kamehameha was also intimate with Kuakini, the brother of Ka‘ahumanu, one of his future wives. Liholiho, Kamehameha’s heir, had an aikāne relationship with Mataio Kekūanao‘a and Nāihekukui who was the eventual father of Kamehameha III’s legal wife, Hakaleleponi Kalama (Kamakau 1992: 390; Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 145, 166). 9 A chief named Ka-lani-mano-o-ka-ho‘owaha fells Cook (Kamakau 1992: 103). 10 See Gilbert 1982. 11 Traumatic repetition is central to marital gothic which critiques the expectation of female self-abnegation central to patriarchy (Massé 1992). Russ notes paranoia is central to the gothic novel because of the unbalanced relations of power (Russ 1973). For postcolonial gothic, see Dayan 1993. 12 See McKinzie 1998 for the distinction between pi‘o (full–brother, full–sister mating), naha (half–brother, half–sister mating), and ho‘i (uncle–niece, aunt–nephew mating). The term “nī‘aupi‘o” can also refer to the offspring of these various matings (xiii). 13 “Ali‘i Nui” translates roughly into high chief, next in hierarchy to Mō‘ī or paramount chief. 14 For discussion on Lono in relation to the bombing of Kaho‘olawe, see Morales 1994. 15 “Pupule wahine” literally means “crazy woman.” Mele “knows how to have a good time.” 16 The semi-narcotic drink made of the masticated root of the pepper plant. 17 This view differs from Luomala who argues that aikāne was a close same-sex friendship involving informal adoption: Relatives of the parents’ generation were inoa makua (parents-in-name) who cared for the offspring’s friend as if they were blood kin (Luomala 1987: 34). 18 “Māhū” can refer to all of the following: same-sex friendship between men or women, cross-gender identification, and same-sex desire. Its meaning has shifted such that in recent times it is a derogatory term denoting an effeminate man and/or homosexual man. See Luangphinith 2004. 19 Keōpūolani, mother of Liholiho (Kamehameha II), Kauikeaouli, and Nāhi‘ena‘ena, was the result of two generations of Nī‘aupi‘o matings. Keōpūolani’s mating with

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20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Notes Kamehameha was also Nī‘aupi‘o because he was technically an uncle (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 42–43). Hakaleleponi Kalama was of low birth and none of his children by her lived past infancy. In Kauikeaouli’s private life, bouts of drunkenness and adultery continued. He began an affair with Jane Lahilahi Young, John Young’s daughter, and had a son by her. He also took as aikāne C. G. Hopkins and John Stevenson (Kame‘eleihiwa 1992: 166–67, 176). Puna also recalls another child of Kamehameha lineage, Queen Emma’s son who died at the age of 5. Had she been elected, he would have succeeded her. See Wyllie 1846; Hasager 1998. I owe this insight to my mother, Joyce M. Najita, who grew up in this area in the 1930s. Julian, the nephew of Abraham Hanohano, may be modeled after an acquaintance of Holt’s when he lived in the working-class Kalihi district as a young boy (Holt 1993: 140). While 20 percent of Ceded Lands revenue has been designated since the 1978 Constitutional Convention for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), very little of this revenue is actually received by OHA. See Trask 1993. Since 1997 Congress has authorized an amendment to the HHCA allowing grandchildren of lessees who are of 25 percent quantum or more to inherit Hawaiian Homes Land leases. See also Strong 1885. See also Thomas 1997. I am indebted to Maxwell 1995 for calling attention to Krao. See Bingham 1847. For the relevance of the shark-god in Holt, see Wilson 2000. For Holt’s opinions of Malo and Kamakau, see Holt 1993. Other hō‘ailona are hihi‘o and ‘ūlāleo. The first term refers to a fleeting vision seen when just about to drop off to sleep or when just awakening. The second refers to a spirit voice, a “supernatural voice or sound” (Pukui et al. 1983: 11).

2 Recounting the past, telling new futures 1 For a historical approach to reading Wendt’s entire oeuvre, see Sharrad 2003. Whereas Sharrad’s book uses history, culture, and biographical information as context for Wendt’s work, my approach shows how Wendt’s novel comments upon history and culture. 2 See Wilson 1995. 3 The word ‘āiga means immediate family, extended kin-group, and all male and female descendants from a common ancestor (Meleisea 1987b: 6). 4 “Papalagi” (informally, “pālagi”) means European or white person (Milner 1993). 5 The lāvalava is the traditional form of clothing worn in Samoa, a length of cloth wrapped about the waist, extending often below the knees. 6 Aitu take the form of animals, birds, humans, and other natural objects. Their help was sought out by spirit mediums (taulasea or taulaitu)—usually descendants of the aitu themselves. See Meleisea 1987a: 36–37. 7 Children from Chinese or Melanesian men and Samoan women were usually absorbed into the mother’s ‘āiga. The New Zealand administration arrested cohabitators in the 1930s; men were fi ned and returned to their home country, and the women were sent back to their villages and not allowed to see their partners. Children from workers at the New Zealand Reparation Estates were not allowed to live with the Samoan mother’s family; instead they became part of a small landless class with no political representation. See Meleisea 1987b: 173. 8 See Garrett 1982, 1992, 1997; Forman 1992.

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9 Quoted in Field 1984: 201. 10 I am indebted to Galumalemana Alfred Hunkin and Tupuola Malifa for this insight. Personal communication, July 2001, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. See also Milner 1993: 182. 11 The term ali‘i is a more general indication of noble birth and chiefly status, whereas matai designates a titled head of an extended family or ‘āiga (Milner 1993). 12 The fa‘alupega is a highly formalized greeting of a village’s principal matai. It outlines the dignity and place accorded to matai as well as the relationship of local matai titles to the broader lineage structure of Samoa: “[I]t was the pride and duty of the orators to know [the fa‘alupega] for the whole of Samoa” (Davidson 1967: 17). “The national fa‘alupega of Samoa recognises firstly the local polities and districts through their principal orator groups, then the two most important districts not represented by the former, and finally the descent groups or ‘āiga (families) of Samoa through their highest ranking titles” (Meleisea 1987b: 2). 13 Meleisea 1987a: 114–15. 14 Meleisea 1987a: 115. 15 See Jolly 1996 for how Footnote disturbs notions of history. 16 By the end of the nineteenth century, Hawai‘i had been annexed to the U.S.; Germany had taken the Marianas, Marshall and Caroline Islands in Micronesia, North-western New Guinea, and Western Samoa; Britain ruled Fiji, Papua, the Gilbert (Kiribati) and Ellice Islands (Tuvalu), and shared New Hebrides (Vanuatu) with France. France also had the Society Islands and New Caledonia. Tonga remained semi-independent as a British Protectorate. See Meleisea 1987a: 49. 17 See Field 1984: 28; Meleisea 1987a: 110; and Stevenson 1925: 165–67. 18 New Zealand martial law prohibited both whites and Samoans from drinking alcohol (Field 1984: 52). 19 Faumuinā Fiame Mulinu‘u is an interesting figure. He married the daughter of Malietoa and was also appointed in the 1920s by Richardson to lead the “Fetu,” the Samoan version of Baden-Powell’s boy scouts. Though one of Richardson’s trusted matai who rebuilt his village to the design of Richardson’s model village, he was later banished for participation in the Mau. Upon Independence his son Matā‘afa Faumuina Fiame Mulinu‘u II became the first prime minister (Field 1984: 63, 93). Faumuinā is also part of the genealogy of Wendt’s father’s village, Gagaifo o le vao. Wendt’s father’s title, Tuaopepe, is listed with that of Faumuinā. See O Le Tusi 1946: 87–88. 20 See Craig 1990; Luomala 1986; Grey 1906; Williamson 1933. See also chapter 3, this volume. 21 The resorts and golf courses built on lava flows on the western side of the island of Hawai‘i suggest, though, that lava fields are, tragically, quite appropriatable! 22 There are two forms of banishment. Fa‘ate‘a (or separation) involved destruction of property and the possibility of return. Ati ma le lau (literally, “to pull out the roots and leaves”) offered no possibility of return. The house was burned and crops destroyed (Meleisea 1987b: 132–33). 23 The term “Malo” (which means “alliance which gained temporary ascendancy” and the “dominant part or faction, victorious in war”) came to mean during the colonial period, “the government” (Davidson 1967: 433). During the Mau period, matai who supported the Administration in suppressing Mau activity came to be known as the “Malo.” Approximately 800 Malo persons joined the navy in attempting to capture the Mau leadership (Field 1984: 183). The character Malo Viliamu evokes this notion of Malo as supporter of the western notions of liberal individualism and plantation economy. His name “Viliamu” might evoke “Wilhelm” Solf or even Kaiser Wilhelm. Tauilo eventually occupies Malo’s role as storeowner in the village. 24 See also Arias 1990: 11. 25 Epidemics of other diseases occurred in 1891, 1907, and 1911. Samoans believed that

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27 28 29 30

31

32

33 34 35

Notes the New Zealand government had deliberately introduced the flu. See Wendt 1965, p. 17, ff. 19. Aitu came into the world as ‘alu‘alu toto or clots of blood or abortions and assumed human form. This belief is also found in other Polynesian religions “which attribute the origin of chiefly mana to the offspring of brothers and sisters” (Meleisea 1987a: 36). Galupo’s name means “Night-Wave.” “Galu” means “wave,” and “pō,” “night or darkness.” Subramani 1992 also briefly notes the influence of the fāgogo on Wendt through a Lukácsian perspective (150). However, he does not analyze the novel closely with regard to the fāgogo form. Wendt’s “grip on the reader” invokes the “art of holding an audience with the voice . . . the art of the tusitala, the story-teller” (Crisp 1979: 376). Moyle argues that a kind of “de facto” ownership of certain tales arises when a person’s “reputation for telling it is the best”: he will “not only be allowed to tell it, but may even be urged to do so by the others” (1981: 45). Subramani compares the different expectations of written and oral forms, the way oral tales depend on the teller’s performance: “In written works the actual performance, reading aloud for instance, is a secondary consideration whereas in oral literature the storyteller’s ability to extemporise and exploit audience response is an integral part of the tale” (Subramani 1992: 36). Thiem calls this the “textualization of the reader” in magic realism which occurs in two ways: 1) the reader or sometimes the author will be “transported into the world of a text”; and 2) the world of a text “intrudes into the extratextual or reader’s world” (1995: 235–36). See Flores 1955. This essay read at the MLA in 1954 was the “first time that the expression realismo mágico was used in an academic context to define a turn in Spanish-American literature” (Scarano 1999: 17). Flores considers Kafka, De Chirico, and Borges to be examples of this new form. See Scarano 1999, 9–28. See Manoa 1976 for a reading of Konai Thaman’s “My Blood” which critiques corrupt elites. The transfer from New Zealand to Samoan government occurred in 1962. In May 1961, Samoans voted overwhelmingly for independence and a new Constitution based upon a UNO mission (1947) and Mau recommendations in the 1920s. The only major Samoan institution which remained “unrecognized by the constitution was Tūmua and Pule” (Meleisea 1987a: 156–57).

3 “Fostering” a new vision of Maori community 1 “Pakeha” means “foreigner” but refers more commonly to New Zealanders of European descent. 2 Henke 1993 also argues that Simon’s muteness is the result of “physical and psychological trauma” (138), specifically, postmodern aporia. 3 See Thomas 1997 for the notion of “entanglement” in which European and non-European colonized histories are “linked” but not necessarily “shared.” Entanglement does not imply that all indigenous peoples “need constantly express their identities in relation to colonizers” (13). Entanglement is one way to understand violence and familial relations in Hulme’s novel. 4 See also Deloughrey 1999. 5 Belich’s discussion of the “sex trade” is fairly uncritical. He states that it “revalued womens’ work and status, but also gave men an opportunity to co-opt the value and reduce their status . . . [E]conomically it helped balance the contact equation” (1996: 154). Terming the exchange of women as “women’s work” is problematic; what per-

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9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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sonal gain was possible for these women—who could be either slaves or women of the tribe—especially since Maori men gave the women for exchange and stood to benefit most from the guns? “Pakeha-Maori” were Europeans who before the Treaty of Waitangi were “naturally [sic] at home with Maori people, speaking their language and observing their customs.” They numbered fewer than 2,000 and were often whalers, sealers, or escaped prisoners from Australian penal colonies who stowed away or hid with indigenous tribes. They often married into the tribe and went to battle against Europeans. Their association with “convict ancestry” may be the reason for Pakeha “forgetting” of them (Cleave 1995: 10–11). See also Belich 1996. For a contemporary fictional account, see Grace’s novel Cousins. Hulme has argued that Maori “fighting instinct” [sic] was “carefully nurtured.” See Hulme 1994b: 147. See also Thompson 1999 for critique of Alan Duff. The novel is more ironic than Duff ’s in its use of this image. It undermines Kerewin’s (incorrect) practice of an “imported” art, aikido, suggesting that her warrior instinct is more reflective of Modernist appropriation. Hulme undermines another Maori stereotype, the sharp-toothed cannibal, in Tiaki Mira who is rumored to be one. Contrary to the image, he is unable to bring himself to eat his grandmother’s flesh. These stereotypes of the warrior and the cannibal are vestiges of European representation which the novel slyly undercuts. “Utu” means 1) “Return for anything; satisfaction, ransom, reward, price, reply”; and 2) “Make response, whether by way of payment, blow, or answer, etc.” See Williams 1957. Hulme asserts that the Maori way of disciplining children was a form of humiliation and social censure through words (Hulme 1994b: 146). See Buck 1962: 240. “Tangata whenua” means people of the land, or “people belonging to any particular place, natives.” See Williams 1957: 494. “Mauri” is “life principle.” In order to protect the mauri of a forest, garden, or fishing grounds from “enemy interference,” a priest “localized” its spirit in a “material object” (also termed “mauri”) and recited incantations over it and hid it away. See Metge 1976: 12. A “marae” is both the enclosed space in front of a house, courtyard, or village common, and also refers to the complex of meeting houses, including the wharenui or ancestral house. Herbert W. Williams explains “keria” as “the cry of the torea, a sign of peace: ‘Keria, keria’ (‘Dig, dig!’ i.e., Cultivate your lands).” “Keri” means to “dig,” “[d]ig up, scratch out of the ground.” See Williams 1957: 114. “Whanau” has several applicable meanings here: 1) to be born; 2) to be in “childbed”; 3) “[o]ffspring, family group”; and the modern sense, 4) “Family.” See Williams 1957: 487. See also Awatere 1984; Irwin 1992; Pihama 2005. Personal communication, July 2001, Okarito, New Zealand. See Beames 1986 and Locke 1965. See also Hooper 1967. For more on Simon’s muteness, see Henke 1993; O’Brien 1990. Shaw notes that “exiles” were sent to Australasia instead of Canada because the great distances of open sea would ensure the impossibility of their return (1966: 286). Juveniles were sexually precocious. Most boys had their “molls” by the age of 12, lived with prostitutes, and had contracted venereal diseases (Buddee 1984: 27; 172, ff. 3). Remuera is also mentioned in Hulme’s “A Drift in Dream” as the location of Timon and Marie-Claire’s house and their accident in the Citroen car. See Hulme 1986: 208. See chapter 5; Sharp 1997.

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25 See Dale 1985. 26 “Tuakana” refers to the elder sister of a female, elder brother of a male, or a cousin of the same sex from an elder branch of the family (Williams 1957). 27 For a discussion of the foster child theme in Hawaiian myth, see Luomala 1987. 28 See Tiffin 1988 and During 1985 for discussions on whether the novel is postmodern or postcolonial. 29 “Moana” means “sea” (Williams 1957: 204) and “whenua” means “land” but also the “ground” and “[p]lacenta” or “afterbirth” (494) which is buried in the ground after a child is born (Williams 1957). 30 Baker concurs that “pommy” or “pom” means “Englishman” and may have several origins: the rosy-cheeked pomegranate-like English complexion; an acronym for “Prisoner of Mother England” (POME). The initials POME were “allegedly carved on several cell walls at Port Arthur, Tasmania” (1966: 264). O’Grady explains that “pom” may have also come from the letters POHM, “Prisoner of His Majesty” (1965: 69). 31 A “rahui” is a “mark to warn people against trespassing; used in the case of tapu, or for temporary protection of fruit, birds, or fish, etc.” Rahui are also “used in some districts for boundary posts” (Williams 1957). 32 Personal communication, July 2001, Okarito, New Zealand. 33 Rudé notes the absence of clear records of identification or crimes committed for transported convicts. Records prior to 1826 often did not include the crime for transportation; after 1826 the contracts of indenture for British (English, Scottish, and Welsh) usually described the crime (7). However, for Irish protesters between 1798 and 1824, records that allow for reliable identification are far harder to come by than they are for the British (1978: 8). From 1790 to 1798, the founding years of the first British penal colony in Botany Bay, Irish convicts did not have papers or copies of the contracts of indenture which recorded names and sentences (Shaw 1966: 56). This absence of legal documentation of identity is also echoed in Simon’s absent past. 34 See also O’Neill 1993 and Maxwell 1987. 35 The literal meaning of “maori” is “[n]ormal, usual, ordinary.” “Tangata maori” means a man, human, as opposed to a supernatural being and later after contact comes to mean “a man of the Polynesian race” (Williams 1957). The use of “maori” to mean a “[p]erson of the native race” began around 1850 (Williams 1957: 179). 36 Tiaki Mira is modeled after Hulme’s great-grandfather of the same name (Hulme 1994b: 139). 37 The significance of wairua is explained thus by Hulme: “We believe that if you find yourself in stark trouble, you’ll get help, but you might not recognise the help. And these people, these wairua, because they’re not totally human things, are described as the bones. Now, Joe meets Tiaki Mira. And Kerewin, of course, meets a very peculiar character I’ve never made my mind up about, who is neither one thing nor another and doesn’t seem to live anywhere and is grossly disfigured but who, nonetheless, is an effective agent of help. And that’s her bone person” (Hulme 1994b: 142). 4 “Talking in circles” 1 Nisei is a Japanese term that indicates persons of “second generation” status, the children of immigrants from Japan. 2 After completing his shift at the Kāneohe State Hospital, he would help out in the valley. Personal communication with author, July 25, 2000. 3 The term “kama‘āina haole” literally means “children of the land haole” and refers to those of white or European ancestry who were born and raised in the islands. 4 Okamura argues that Chinese, Japanese, and local Koreans in Hawai‘i did not identify as “Asian American” because they “wield much greater political power at the state level than do their mainland counterparts” (1994: 163). While this may

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be true, my analysis shows the greater need for alliance across a shared history of class oppression under global capitalism. See also Yamamoto 1979 for further definition of “local.” For a discussion of Pak and so-called local cultural nationalism, see Fujikane 1994. Fujikane’s discussion does not sufficiently take into account the complexity of the local, how it encompasses both Hawaiian and non-natives in a complex, shift ing terrain. I am not advocating here a dismantling of Hawaiian rights to land or state institutions—such as in Rice v. Cayetano. Rather, I argue that becoming aware of the historical and constructed nature of racial and ethnic categories may help us to understand the impossibility of unity within the local and simultaneously provide the grounds on which the decolonization—cultural and political—might occur. I envision this latter goal to involve the dismantling of imperial categories and the imagination of new ways of comprehending the world. Local activists did not necessarily want to establish a communist society; rather, their resistance to development was informed by a critique of capital within a colonial and agricultural context. Trask’s work produces a narrative of origin and teleology for the Hawaiian sovereignty movement which marginalizes non-Hawaiians in the Kalama struggle. Pak’s project problematizes this view of Kalama by revealing the complexity of local activism. For more on the conflict between workers’ rights and Hawaiian nationalism, see Niheu 1999: 51. For other comparisons, see Eng 1971. The U.S. military removed peasants from ancestral lands and placed them in semi-fortified communities called “strategic hamlets” where they were insulated from the Vietcong. Eng compares strategic hamlets to communities such as Kalama. Enloe 1990 describes how banana multinationals coerce small farmers through quality standards, rules, and prices without having to assume direct responsibility (142). Although Enloe maintains that Dole and United do not engage in this kind of manipulation of small growers, Karnes says differently. Standard Fruit (Dole) in 1965 implemented an independent planter program which involved a 10-year contract between Standard and local growers (1978: 292). Pak cites among his influences Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alejo Carpentier, and Manuel Puig (2000: 307). See McGregor 1980 for a discussion of the role of forced assimilation in producing this image of Hawaiians. “Māhū” can also mean a “hermaphrodite” (Pukui and Elbert 1986: 220)—and in common usage one who takes on the gender characteristics of the other sex. The 1998 Native Hawaiian plebiscite that asked Hawaiians whether or not they were in favor of electing delegates to a Hawaiian Sovereignty Constitutional Convention brought out fewer than 9,000 of the eligible 150,000 voters. This was due to the State of Hawaii’s budget crisis, which Governor Ben Cayetano claimed prevented him from allocating the appropriate funds to educate people about the vote. The 84 delegates proceeded to draft a constitution despite the boycotts by sovereignty leaders such as Bumpy Kanahele, Kekuni Blaisdell, and Mililani and Haunani-Kay Trask. Among the reasons cited for withdrawal from the state-sponsored process is the Apology Bill which effectively concedes that the 1959 statehood plebiscite is now meaningless under international and U.S. domestic law. Ka Lāhui opposed the Commission because it was a state-run process that will legitimize state control over Trust Lands, a process that could be used to argue that Hawaiians have relinquished their claim to land. Other organizations claim that the state attempted to put in place a Native Hawaiian government without allowing Kānaka Maoli to decide what form of government they wish to have. This 1998 plebiscite also attempts to circumvent and nullify attempts by sovereignty groups to convince the United Nations to reinscribe Hawai‘i to its list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, as has been done in

196

15

16

17 18 19 20 21

22

Notes the case of other Pacific Islands such as Kanaky (New Caledonia) which was reinscribed on the UN list in 1988. In September 2000, the Akaka Bill was introduced to Congress to enable federal recognition of Hawaiians as Native people with a special relationship to the federal government, one that grants nation-within-a-nation status similar to that granted to Native American tribes. The bill remains controversial because it precludes other forms of sovereignty and makes complete independence more difficult. Many sovereignty groups oppose it since it has never been put to a vote by the Hawaiian people. However, the threat of Rice v. Cayetano remains the main catalyst for the bill. The Akaka Bill has had various iterations since then, none as of yet resulting in passage. The status of Lola as female perhaps suggests the gendering of resistance, the way in which local activism has been represented as the purview of masculine resistance against an also masculinized multinational capital. This gendered representation of resistance misrepresents the participation of local and Native Hawaiian women and also suggests the masculinization of resistance within Left ist discourse in general. I disagree with Kent who argues that the local “Asian elite” sided with multinationals and the Big Five against the people. Pak’s vision differs from Kent’s in describing how “local” identity originated in interethnic unity—which also included Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians involved in the ILWU and other labor unions—opposed to the haole Big Five and recent multinational corporations. Kent also argues that the Asian elite replaced the Big Five in political control of Hawai‘i. The oligarchic structure of the Territorial period is very different from a democratically elected government, a structure of dispersed power and wealth, and support of workers’ rights. Sam Lono helped reestablish traditional Hawaiian religious ceremonies at Hakioawa on Kaho‘olawe (Kanahele 1995: 155). The ahupua‘a is the traditional Hawaiian land division suited to the geology of the islands. It is a pie-shaped division ranging from mountain tops to the reefs. See J. Kelly 1983. See Lowe 1996: 115–16. “[H]uli” means to “turn, reverse; to curl over, as a breaker; to change, as an opinion or manner of living”; to “turn, change, affect, overturn, convert, reform”; to “look for, search, explore, seek, study; search, investigation, scholarship”; “[t]aro top, as used for planting; shoot, as of wauke” (Pukui and Elbert 1986: 89). See Bakhtin 1984.

5 Making Pakeha history 1 This chapter began as two articles which I present here in revised and amended form. See Najita 2001b, 2003. 2 “Pakeha” means “foreigner” and “a person of predominantly European descent” (Williams 1957). 3 “Rangatiratanga” means “full, true chieftainship or authority” (Sharp 1997: 17). 4 Of the 213 signatures William Hobson obtained by the fall of 1840, only 43 were obtained at the official meeting at Waitangi on February 6. See Orange 1996. 5 Whenever possible in this chapter I will refer to the fi lm’s representations of Maori as characters and not to direct presentation of Maori. 6 Bruzzi argues that proximity between “clothes and body” articulates Ada’s “sexual awakening,” her “abstract desire for closeness” (1995: 265). In the year when Campion fi lmed The Piano, a fi lm adaptation of Jane Mander’s novel The Story of a New Zealand River was dropped from funding by the New Zealand Film Commission. Goldson 1997 discusses the controversy and the marketing of “a clean, green New Zealand” to fi lm production companies. The locations for Campion’s fi lm included in and around Karekare Beach (west of Auckland), Matakana (north of Warkworth), and Awakino (in northern Taranaki) (Pryor 1993: 25).

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7 See Hardy 1994: 11; D. Baker 1997; and Perkins 1997. 8 For a contrasting reading of Baines’s refusal to objectify Ada, see Gillett 1995. While I agree with this reading, I also would maintain that there are other not-so-innocent motives for his gift as well. 9 Where I quote text from the screenplay, I include page numbers. Quotes taken from the fi lm itself are not parenthetically documented. 10 Ada plays Chopin’s “Prelude,” Op. 28, No. 7 in A Major. 11 Campion points out that Ada’s muteness is not a “handicap” but a “‘choice not to speak . . ., it’s a strategy’” (Pryor 1993: 25). 12 My use of the term “natural” here is ironic as well, for there is a kind of implied irony about the presumed “naturalness” of heterosexual relations in romance narratives. Campion emphasizes this through the campy character Tahu who propositions Baines at the stream, “You no worry, Peini, I save you!” 13 Molina also argues that the fi lm is about the “deficiency of language” (1997: 272). While this may be true, the fi lm explores the violence of contact, how the fundamental cause of violence in the fi lm is the incommensurability of different languages, the need for translators who act as “buffers” which prevent violence from occurring. For example, it is crucial that Stewart removes Ada’s finger as a culmination of a series of unanswered questions and Flora is not able to translate for her: “Why do you do this? Why do you make me hurt you? Do you hear? Why have you done it? . . . You have made me angry. SPEAK!” Her finger is made to answer for Ada, as Stewart says to her: “You shall answer for this. Speak or not you shall answer for it! . . . Do you love him? Do you?! Is it him you love?” (96–97). 14 Campion’s use of fairy tales is also evident in her fi lm An Angel at My Table on the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame. See reference to “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” in Part I, “To the Is-land.” 15 See D. Baker 1997; Perkins 1997. 16 Bacchilega 1997 argues that the Blue Beard plot is structured by duplicity and doubling in that the heroine must be as clever, deceptive, and manipulative as Blue Beard himself and thus suggests her affinity to him. This duplicity and doubling is also refigured in Campion’s fi lm to suggest the similarity between Ada and the Maori—the duplicity (constructedness) of that comparison as well as the duplicity of the Treaty itself. 17 For discussion of the different versions of the Treaty, see Orange 1996. 18 Twenty years after the signing, the colonial government issued a new translation of the Treaty which spelt out the official understanding of the agreement: “Maori had signed away sovereignty of the country in 1840. There was no cause for them to seek separate institutions and no basis for alleging that their rights under the treaty had been ignored or imperfectly implemented” (Orange 1996: 3). 19 Bacchilega reads Baines’s actions as a dismemberment of Ada, another enactment of the Blue Beard plot in which different parts of her body are displayed for him (1997: 130). 20 See Bacchilega 1997: 110. 21 Ada is also linked to the land “spiritually” through a shot sequence that occurs after Baines returns the piano and while Flora plays a Scottish tune for Stewart. As Ada wanders among the burning trunks, there is a close-up of her hair gathered in an ornate bun and then a shot of the virginal and green bush. The camera work in this scene suggests that the viewer is moving toward and into Ada’s head through her hair and into her thoughts of the land. The fi lm evokes the role of hair in Maori culture. See chapter three; also Salmond 1985. 22 L. Hardy discusses the fi lm in terms of “natural occupancy” which involves surrendering the “furnishings of culture both European and bourgeois” in order to “come into the sensuality of a ‘natural occupancy’ of the new land.” Occupation occurs through a fictional imagining of settler society’s “unhistoric origin as the (possibility

198

23 24

25 26

27 28 29

Notes of the) making of a settlement without a colony” (1995: 214). I argue, instead, that Ada in fact does not give up the bourgeois order; the fi lm asserts the contradictory claims of Pakeha identity based upon settler claims. For a discussion of the fi lm’s use of white, see Dyson 1995. Renan wrote of forgetting and its relation to the nation: “Forgetting . . . historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical inquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations . . . Unity is always effected by means of brutality” (1993: 11). For a reading of the fi lm in terms of sexual fetishism, see Gordon 1996 and Segal 1997. The man in the cartoon image bears a strong resemblance to Stewart in his first appearance on the beach, for the cartoon man is dressed in a blackish-blue coat and tails with a top hat. The similarity suggests that Flora’s tale attempts to erase Stewart’s existence as Ada’s new husband by positing a previous, more original predecessor. This is exactly what the fi lm also tries to create, the sense of an “authentic” original Pakeha identity. The novel shows Baines to be an “ex-whaler” from Britain (Cleave 1995: 12). In the novel Ada decides to be silent forever because at 6, when she contradicted the adults, she was ordered not to speak again that day (Segal 1997: 210). Baines might be a Pakeha-Maori which implies a European who before the Treaty of Waitangi was “naturally [sic] at home with Maori people, speaking their language and observing their customs” (Cleave 1995: 10) They numbered fewer than 2,000 and were often whalers, sealers, or escaped prisoners from Australian penal colonies who stowed away or hid with indigenous tribes. They often married into the tribe and went to battle against Europeans (10). Their association with a convict ancestry may be the reason for Pakeha “forgetting” them (11). I would argue that Baines is not a usual Pakeha-Maori because his moko is not completed, suggesting he is not completely part of Maori society, and also because he does not wish to have a Maori wife. For more on Pakeha-Maori, see Belich 1996 and Cleave 1995.

Epilogue 1 Early magic realist novels such as Asturias’s El Señor Presidente represent opposition through internal freedom in spaces of repression such as the prison. See Chambers 1991. 2 In Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman and other texts by Carpentier and Asturias, there is a deeply flawed aspect of witnessing which overlooks the role of mediation in producing discourse of power. Puig’s novel seduces the reader out of the desire for power only to make him/her desire a “more liberating form of love” (Chambers 1991: 16). In Asturias’s El Señor Presidente witnessing can be complicit with totalitarian regimes, especially in a state controlled by propaganda and misinformation. See Chambers 1991: 16, 207. 3 See also Silva 1997, 2004; Kame‘eleihiwa 1992, 1996; Osorio 2002, 2003; and Stillman 1989, 2001, 2002.

Glossary

The following terms and definitions are not intended to be comprehensive or defi nitive; rather, they are selected terms and definitions that often have multiple meanings. I have selected the definitions that are representative of a general understanding as they relate to the ideas explored in this volume. For more specific discussions of the many meanings of some of these terms, please refer to the chapters themselves.

Hawaiian (‘ōlelo Hawai‘i) terms Unless otherwise noted, definitions for Hawaiian terms in quotation marks come from Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary (1986). ahupua‘a traditional land division suited to the geology of the islands. It is a pieshaped division ranging from the mountain tops to the reefs. aikāne companion of the same sex; sometimes refers to the male lover of a male chief. ‘aikapu eating taboos; the taboo that separates male and female elements and persons when eating and in the preparation of foods. akua “God, goddess, spirit, ghost”; “divine, supernatural, godly.” akualele “Flying god, usually a poison god sent to destroy, sometimes in the form of fireballs (pōpō ahi).” ali‘i nui high chief; below mō‘ī and above ali‘i and konohiki. aloha meanings include “love, affection, compassion,” etc. ‘aumākua “Family or personal gods, deified ancestors who might assume the shape” of sharks, owls, hawks, birds, and other animals. People were not to “harm or eat” such animals because they “warned and reprimanded mortals in dreams, visions, and calls.” haole foreigner; today primarily refers to white American. hapa haole lit. half white; “[p]art-white person; of part-white blood; part white and part Hawaiian, as an individual or phenomenon.” Hawaiki homeland, place of origin before migration. heiau “Pre-Christian place of worship, shrine; some heiau were elaborately constructed stone platforms, others simple earth terraces.” ho‘omana to “place in authority, empower,” “to worship.” hō‘ailona (also ‘ailona) “Sign, symbol,” “signal, omen, portent.” hō‘ike a revelation, knowing, seeing, receiving of knowledge from the gods (Pukui et al. 1983: 54). hukihuki “To pull or draw frequently, or by many persons; to pull by jerks or

200

Glossary

continuously, as in the tug-of-war game; . . . friction, dissension”; to “disagree, quarrel; disagreement; not cooperative, headstrong, obstinate.” huli to “turn, reverse”; to change; “to look for, search, explore, seek, study.” ‘ili ‘ōuli “disturbed skin sensations” of various sorts that indicate omens or supernatural signs (Pukui et al. 1983) ka wā mahope the future; literally means “the time which comes after or behind.” ka wā mamua the past; literally means “the time in front or before.” kahu “attendant, guardian, nurse, keeper of ‘unihipili bones,” “caretaker.” “According to J. S. Emerson 92: 2, kahu ‘implies the most intimate and confidential relations between the god and its guardian or keeper, while the word kahuna suggests more of the professional relation of the priest to the community.” kahuna an “expert in any profession,” including a spiritual practitioner. kalo the taro plant. kama‘āina haole literally means “children of the land haole” and refers to those of white or European ancestry who were born and raised in the islands. Kānaka Maoli “true or real person”; the term used by Hawaiians to refer to themselves at the time of contact. This term is “staging a comeback as a substitute for the term Hawaiian” because it was the term the ancestors used to refer to themselves (Blaisdell 2000: 182). kanikau a “dirge, lamentation, chant of mourning; to chant, wail.” kaona “Hidden meaning, as in Hawaiian poetry; concealed reference, as to a person, thing, or place; words with double meanings that might bring good or bad fortune.” The term refers to the multiple layers of hidden meanings and references to persons, places, things, and events in songs or chants. kinolau material or bodily form of an akua (god). ko‘ihonua genealogical chant that records descent. konohiki “Headman of an ahupua‘a land division under the chief; land or fishing rights under control of the konohiki.” Kū many meanings, including akua (god) of war. kū‘auhau genealogy composed of name chants that records connections between persons and specific places as well as less formal connections such as fostering (luhi) or adoption (hānai), extended family relations, or even non-familial non-biological ones. kuleana meanings include “small piece of property, as within an ahupua‘a”; also refers to small plots of land distributed to commoners during the Māhele of 1848. kūwō “to howl” or “cry loudly, as with joy or pain.” lāhui “nation, race, tribe, people.” liliha “heartsick, as over a tragedy; revolted, disgusted, as by a hideous crime; dreadful, fearful.” Lono akua (god) of agriculture, cultivation, fertility, pleasure and games. lū‘au meanings include a “feast, named for the taro tops always served at one.” māhū “Homosexual, of either sex; hermaphrodite”; also can refer to same-sex friendship between men or women, cross-gender identification (feminine man or masculine woman). Contemporary usage usually implies this last cross-gender meaning accompanied by derogation. maka‘āinana commoner. mālama “To take care of, tend, attend, care for, preserve, protect, . . . maintain.” mālama ‘āina to preserve and care for the land. mana “Supernatural or divine power, . . . miraculous power,” “authority.”

Glossary

201

mele song, chant of any kind, poem, poetry. mele inoa “Name chant, i.e., chant composed in honor of a person, as of a chief.” mō‘ī paramount chief or king. naha half-brother and half-sister chiefly mating (McKinzie 1998: xiii). nī‘aupi‘o see pi‘o. ōkakala a type of skin sign (‘ili ‘ōuli); a tingling, prickling, numbing, chilling or “creepy-crawly” sensation that foretells a misfortune or signifies a supernatural presence (Pukui et al. 1983). okolehao ti root liquor. oli Chant that was not danced to, especially with prolonged phrases chanted in one breath. pāhoa short dagger; sharp stone used as a weapon. paniolo “Cowboy (sometimes called paniolo pipi to distinguish from paniolo)”; also “Spaniard, Spain; Spanish.” Refers to the particular tradition that resulted from nineteenth-century importation of vaqueros to Hawai‘i from the Americas. Papa the Earth Mother. pi‘o full-brother and full-sister chiefly mating (McKinzie 1998: xiii). Also nī‘aupi‘o. pō meanings include “[n]ight, darkness, obscurity; the realm of the gods; pertaining to or of the gods . . .”; origin of all things. po‘olua lit. two heads; a “[c]hild sired by other than the husband, but accepted by both husband and sire; this acceptance increased the number of relatives of the child who gave their loyalty to him as kinsmen; it thus fostered the prestige of children of chiefs.” punalua lit. two springs; “[f]ormerly, spouses sharing a spouse, as two husbands of a wife, or two wives of a husband.” Wākea the Sky-Father.

Maori (Te Reo) terms Unless otherwise noted, definitions in quotation marks come from Herbert W. Williams’s A Dictionary of the Maori Language, 7th ed. (1971). hapū a “section of a large tribe, clan, secondary tribe”; lit. means to be “pregnant.” hoa takatāpui an “[i]ntimate companion of the same sex.” hokonga “[e]xchange, barter, buy, sell.” hui tribal gathering or meeting. iwi lit. “bones”; refers to tribe, “nation,” or “people.” kawanatanga governance, “delegated and limited rights” (Sharp 1997: 8). kekeri “[f]ight” or “quarrel.” kerikeri “[d]ig up repeatedly.” mana atua spiritual, godly power. marae village gathering place or commons in front of wharenui. mauri or mauri ora “life principle, thymos of man”; “talisman, a material symbol of the hidden principle protecting vitality, mana, fruitfulness, etc., of people, lands, forests, etc.” moko tattoos on the face or body. mua the past, lit. the time in front. muri the future, lit. the time in the rear. pakeha foreigner; refers more commonly to New Zealanders of European descent.

202

Glossary

pounamu greenstone, jade. puhi a virgin of high rank. rangatira chief. ruku meanings include to “[l]et oneself fall, hurl oneself”; to “[p]erform ceremonial ablutions”; and to “[g]ather together.” rukutanga “Collecting together. A term used of gathering the bones of a corpse in order to deposit them in the final resting place.” tāhoro to “[c]ause to crumble down, throw down a heap or structure.” taka “spiral pattern in carving”; to “[u]ndergo change in direction”; to “[b]e completely encircled”; and “[o]n all sides, round.” tangata maori an “ordinary person”; a man, human; a Māori person. tangata whenua the people of a place, land; also may refer to the indigenous people of Aotearoa. taonga treasured possessions, things highly prized. taua an “avenging expedition” or war party. Te Reo the Maori language. tino rangatiratanga chiefly authority. tohunga “skilled person”; “priest.” tūpuna ancestor, grandparent. tūtūa of mean or low birth; “person of low degree.” utu a return for anything or response; may take the form of payment, compensation, reward, response, etc. wairua a spirit, shadow, bone person (ancestor). ware “mean, low in social position.” whakairo carving. whakapapa genealogy. whānau “family group” or extended family; lit. to “be born,” “offspring.” wharenui ancestral house. whenua “land,” “ground”; “placenta, afterbirth.”

Samoan terms Unless otherwise noted, defi nitions for Samoan terms in quotation marks come from G. B. Milner’s Samoan Dictionary, 2nd edition (1993). afakasi part-European, part-Samoan person. ‘āiga descent group; extended family. aitu “ghost, spirit.” ali‘i chief, someone of noble birth. ati ma le lau literally, “to pull out the roots and leaves.” Type of banishment that offered no possibility of return. The house was burned and crops destroyed (Meleisea 1987b: 132–33). fa‘a Sāmoa the Samoan way or custom. fa‘alupega national ceremonial address. fa‘ate‘a type of banishment from village that involved destruction of property and the possibility of return. fāgogo tale. fanua land. feagaiga special relationship of respect and honor between brother and sister.

Glossary

203

fono meeting; village council. lāvalava the traditional form of clothing composed of a length of cloth wrapped about the waist, extending often below the knees. matai a “titled head of a Samoan extended family (formally elected and honored as such).” papalagi or pālagi “European, white man.” tulāfale orator or talking chief. tu‘ua senior orator.

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Index

abuse 104–105; penance and penitence as 112–15; physical 99, 104, 114, 121–22, 146, 188; see also body, violence acting-out 22, 26, 30–35, 123; disruption of linear time and 47; dreams 36–39; repetition of 61–62; see also trauma adoption 23, 29, 36, 40, 115, 119, 154, 189; see also hānai adulteration 98 adultery 39–43, 65, 70–71, 90, 98, 190 adverse possession 144, 149–50 aesthetic 21, 32, 39–43, 67, 114–16, 120, 139, 186, 188; magic realism as 20–21, 26, 96, 131, 140, 142, 145, 184, 188; see also traumatic realism afakasi 67, 202 Afamasaga 82 Ahmad, Aijaz 184 ahupua‘a 149, 196, 199, 200 ‘āiga 68–69, 81, 190, 191; defi n. of 66, 190, 202; chiefly titles and 67, 69–70, 75–76, 191; land and 67–70 aikāne 37, 42, 44, 55, 59, 189, 190, 199; see also sexual practices ‘aikapu 40, 199 aitu 67, 71, 88, 89, 91; defi n. of 67, 190, 192, 202; evil aitu 84, 91–93; Galupo as 61, 91–93, 97, 98; “lions and aitu” 69, 30–34, 154; racism as form of 97 Akaka Bill 10, 188–89, 196 Akana, Rev. Akaiko 49 akua 41–42, 199, 200 alcohol 143; fa‘amafu (home-brewed beer) 78; legal prohibition for natives (Samoa) 67, 78, 191; see also infantilization Alegría, Fernando 21, 64 ali‘i see chiefs alienation: cultural 11, 61; genealogical 116, 126–27, 178; of land 105, 169–71, 181 allegory 72, 108, 128 Allen, Stephen Shepherd 72, 88 Allende, Isabel 20 alliances 184, 172–74; boy convicts and

Maori 111; class alliances 26, 111, 132–37, 180–81; fracturing of 135–36, 148; marriage alliances, see marriage practices; shared history of oppression 13–14, 133–34, 172–74, 179, 192, 195; with natives 13, 26, 111, 131–36, 138, 144, 147, 150, 154, 173–74, 181, 186; see also “local” (in Hawai‘i) aloha ‘āina 147–48, 199; see also mālama ‘āina Aloha Stadium 131 ‘alu ‘alu toto 89–90, 192 American Samoa 9, 74, 130, 131; Pagopago 9 American Studies 3, 7 Amin, Samir 130 ancestry 134, 154, 160, 178, 181, 194, 200; convict 108, 193, 198; genealogy and 22, 23, 60, 73, 83, 89, 107, 116, 117, 119, 181, 184, 190, 197, 199, 202; indigenous xviii, 28–29, 102, 108, 118, 120, 174–75, 186, 199; Oceania and 1, 125; trauma and 32,124; see also genealogy, mana, tūpuna Ang, Ien 187, 188 annexation 5, 10, 22, 30, 47, 49–50, 58–59, 130, 147, 184 Anthias, Floya 160 anthropology 14, 24, 32, 38, 41; literature and 19, 24, 97, 125; objectification of native and 30, 33–35, 38–39, 41; trauma and 32, 38; see also ethnography Aoraki (Mt. Cook) 100 Aotearoa 1, 3, 4, 5, 7–10, 11, 13, 102, 106, 107, 113, 126, 156–58, 173–74, 176, 180–83, 202; South Island 9 APEC (Asian-Pacific Economic Conference) 12 appropriation 43, 66, 116; of chiefly authority 75–76, 79; of the feminine 108; of genealogy 20, 23, 90–91, 98, 158, 172, 181; of indigeneity 13, 26, 88, 116, 157–58, 179, 182, 193; of land 110, 139, 144; of resistance history 66, 183; of tradition 66, 90, 81; of western culture 39, 180, 184; see also Christianity in Samoa, culture, indigenization archipelagoes 7, 9 archive, colonial 13, 95

Index 221 Arias, Arturo 191 Arthurian legend 120 Asia-Pacific 8, 12, 21, 136, 142, 184, 188 Asturias, Miguel Ángel 198 ‘aumākua 56, 60, 199 aurality 23, 150–54, 181 autonomic response 18, 34, 35; see also trauma Awatere, Donna 107, 193 awe 117 Bacchilega, Cristina 197 Bailey family, Maui 29, 54 Baker, David 197 Bakhtin, Mikhail 153, 196 Balaz, Joseph Puna 3–7, 181, 186; “Da Mainland to Me” 3, 5, 7 banana republics 138–42 banishment: ati ma le lau 191, 202; fa‘ate‘a 191, 202; penal transportation as form of 109, 115, 117; from villages, under fa‘a Sāmoa 65, 74, 81–82, 85–86; see also Mau movement, penal transportation, Samoan Offenders Ordinance banyan tree 84; see also Wendt, Leaves of the Banyan Tree Barclay, Barry 157; Te Rua 157 Barclay, Robert: Melal 13 Barrenechea, Ana María 95 Bastion Point 11 Bayonet Constitution 9, 10 Beaglehole, J. C. 37–38, 41 Beames, Margaret 194; The Parkhurst Boys 108, 111 Becker, David 63 Beckwith, Martha 41 Beechert, Edward D. 145, 146 Belich, James 9, 102, 125, 166, 192–93, 198 Bhabha, Homi 15, 23, 165, 187 biculturalism 10–13, 26, 99, 100, 156–57, 161, 173, 174, 179; equal partnership 168 “The Big Five” 131, 137, 196 Biggs, Bruce 102–103 Bikini Atoll 11 Bildungsroman 18–19, 120, 122; development and 19, 47; role in socialization 19, 47, 62; subject formation in 47; trauma and 19, 47, 62; see also novel Bingham, Hiram 44–45, 190 biopiracy 12–13, 182 Bishop Estate 131–33, 144, 148 Bishop, Princess Bernice Pauahi 133 Blaisdell, Richard Kekuni xviii, 186, 195, 200 blood quantum xviii, 28–29, 30, 49, 126, 129, 143, 155 “Blue Beard” 26, 159, 165–67, 170–72, 174, 176–77, 197 body 32, 129; autonomic response 18, 34, 35; dead 84, 147, 165, 167; disciplining of 43, 78–79, 103, 108–16, 122; diseased 31, 32, 88, 107; dying native 86, 88–89; epistemology

and 34–36; loss of control over 34, 43; patriarchy and woman’s 159, 170, 173, 197; traumatized 18, 22, 35–36, 62–63, 70, 101, 123; unconscious remembering and 62; see also depopulation, diseases, genocide Bonaparte, Lucien 54 The Bone People 12, 13, 15, 19, 22, 25–26, 72, 99–129, 192; Binny Daniels 104–105, 110; cancer 106–107; glossary of 107; hair, significance of 117; Hana 113, 115, 121, 124, 126; Joe 99, 101, 103–109, 113–20, 122, 126, 133, 135, 194; Kerewin, meaning of name 115; “Keria!” 107, 193; Luce 104, 114; Marie-Claire 115, 121, 193; Timon Padraic McDonnagh 109, 111, 115, 193; shape of 127–29; Simon 108–14, 192; “Te tahoro ruku” 107, 202; Tiaki Mira 106–107, 118, 125–26, 193, 194; tricephalos sculpture 120; see also Keri Hulme Borges, Jorge Luis 20, 21, 25, 64, 92–97, 192n; blurring of subject and object 93–94; Borgesian 21, 25, 92–95, 97; “El milagro secreto” 96; Ficciones 94–96; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” 95–96; see also magic realism Borofsky, Robert 42 boundaries 1, 3, 5, 8, 14 boy convicts, see convicts Brantlinger, Patrick 88 Brennan, Joseph 56, 189 Brennan, Timothy 20, 56, 183, 186–87, 189 British Larceny Act 112–13 Bruzzi, Stella 196 Buck, Sir Peter 118, 125 Buddee, Paul 109–10, 193 Burnett, Robert 113 bush, the: clearing of 70–71, 80; contrast with civilization (in The Piano) 163–64, 170, 175–76, 178, 197; place of ancestors and gods 73, 84; place of memory and resistance 80–82; place of refuge 80–85; subsistence and 66–67; see also lava, Mau movement, resistance, subsistence Campion, Jane 12, 13, 16, 20, 26, 181, 196; appropriation of indigeneity in 23, 25–26; Holy Smoke 157; Sweetie 157; see also The Piano capitalism: commodification of land 67, 71, 86, 156, 181; effect on genealogy 90; magic realism and critique of 20, 26; sexuality and 101–103, 108, 181; see also economy of violence, globalization, multinational corporations, sexual economy card games 90; card playing 63, 66–67, 70, 72, 91–93, 98; cheating at 66, 70, 72; wild card 72, 91–93, 98; see also joker Caribbean 7, 15 carnivalesque: critique of development 78, 145, 153; “lower body functions” 153–54 Caro, Niki 180

222

Index

Caroline Islands 68 Carpentier, Alejo 96, 195, 198; El reino de este mundo 96 Carter, Alfred Wellington 56 Caruth, Cathy 18, 188n Castle and Cooke 138–39 Ceded Lands 49–50, 190 Celtic myth as genealogy 120 Chambers, Ross 182, 198 chants: kanikau 35–36; kū‘auhau 29; to Lono 41; mana and 42; mele inoa 29; oli 181, 201 Charlot, John 41, 43 charter systems 8, 9, 10; Freibriefen 67–68 Chartists 112 Cheah, Pheng 21, 186–88 chiefly incest see Hawaiian, pi‘o, sexual practices chiefs 180, 67–69, 76; ali‘i 37–40, 42, 44–46, 59, 60, 72, 189, 191, 199, 202; Hawai‘i ali‘i and ali‘i nui 29, 38, 39, 40, 21, 42, 44–46; naming of 41–42; primogeniture and 118; rangatira 102, 118, 202; rivalry between 69–70, 102; see also fa‘a Sāmoa, orator chiefs, prestige, rangatiratanga, status, Tūmua and Pule Christianity: aestheticization of suffering in 114–15; Calvinist missionaries in Hawai‘i 10, 29–30, 32–36, 40–41, 50, 59; conversion of chiefs in Hawai‘i 44–45; cultural delegitimation and 32, 33–36, 39, 44–46, 55, 61; economy of sin and salvation 115; effect on sexual practices 107; evangelicism in Aotearoa 26; in Samoa 25, 65, 69, 89, 180; law and 85; penance and penitence 112–15; primitivization and 35, 60–61; in prison culture 109–15; Protestants in New Zealand 8; Roman Catholic Church in New Zealand 8, 113; sexual practices, prohibition of 44–45; see also evangelicism CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific) 130 civilization: savagery and 39, 41, 60, 77, 88; wildness and 51–53; see also primitive, primitivization civilizing: role of missionaries in 32, 33, 34, 36, 40, 41 Cleave, Peter 193, 198 Clifford, James 15–16, 20 Colombia 138–40, 142 colonial culture: incoporation of 91–92, 97; indigenization of 91 colonialism 3, 5; comparative history of 8–12; effect on gender and sexuality 25, 44–60, 104, 107–108, 159, 172, 180, 181 (see also gender, women; sex, sexual economy, sexual identity, sexual pleasure, sexual practices, sexuality); layering of 7, 9; rationalization for 5, 8; see also land, plantation colonialism colonization 3; multiple 10, 16, 48, 180; ongoing 9, 12, 13–17, 22, 28, 29, 32, 43, 63, 124, 181, 187; psychology of 14 commoners: maka‘āinana 40, 42, 145, 200; tūtūa 118; ware 118

Commonwealth: Studies 3, 7–9; countries 157 community: imagined 19, 127, 158, 178; indigenous 24, 29, 31, 132; “local” 20, 131–32, 139, 143–44, 147–48, 150–51, 154; nationalism and 156; new forms of 26, 74, 99–101, 115–16, 124, 126–27, 129; struggles and activism xiii, 132–35, 139, 152, 154 comparative methodology 1–2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14 Connery, Christopher 188 contact 8, 12, 21, 24; disease and depopulation 31; effect on oral tradition, genealogy 90, 121; ethnography and 24, 32–33, 36–38; legal defi nition of Hawaiians and 28, 30, 32; the uncanny and 37; violence and trauma 17, 18, 21, 22, 25, 32, 36–38, 63, 101, 166, 181 continent 3, 5–6, 7, 186; see also mainland convicts, boy 13, 22, 24, 26, 100, 108–14, 121, 180; conditions in prison 109–10; reform of through Christian repentance 109, 113; see also Christianity, evangelicism, penal transportation Cook, James 17, 19, 24, 28, 31, 36–39, 41, 50, 102, 119, 166–67, 187, 189 Cook-Lynn Elizabeth 187–88 copra 66–71, 77 corporal punishment 146; see also abuse cosmogony 15, 41, 181, 182; Samoan 70, 73, 89–90 cosmopolitanism 20–21, 26, 142, 183, 188; magic realism and 20; “new” 21; postcolonial novel 20, 26 Costa Rica 139 counter-transference 122–23, 127 cowboy masculinity and U.S. imperialism 55–59; see also paniolo criminalization; eugenics and 48–49, 50, 55; of orator chiefs 65, 74; of resistance 38–39, 66, 74, 85, 90, 109, 112, 117, 124, 135, 148, 181; of subsistence 46, 74, 134, 145–50, 134–35, 181; see also indolence laws, laziness, penal transportation, surplus production Crocombe, Marjorie 92 Crown Lands (Hawai‘i) 46 Crown, the 13, 26, 54, 99, 100, 109, 111, 112, 157, 168–69 Dale, Judith 114, 120, 194 Davenport, Charles B. 48 Davidson, J. W. 68, 73–74, 76, 81–83, 85, 87, 191 Davis, Isaac 37 de Certeau, Michel 15, 129 de Th ierry, Baron Charles 8 death and dying 72–73, 78–79, 81, 84, 86–89, 147, 165, 167; see also diseases decolonization 2, 8, 13, 142; aurality and 23, 150–54, 181; culture and 12, 20, 22, 64, 97, 180; gender and 8, 16, 29, 107, 181; land and 15, 27, 108, 181, 187; national identity and 14, 62; orality and 15, 128–29, 150–55, 181; racism and 2, 97; reading and 20–22, 24–25,

Index 223 43, 46–47, 180, 182–85; sexuality and 15, 16, 66, 55, 58, 107–108; shamanism and 97; trauma and 16, 17 Deeken, Richard 68 degeneration, racial 48–50, 55–57 Del Monte 139 delegitimation of culture 17, 30–36, 39, 44, 58–66, 73 Deloughrey, Elizabeth xiv, 192 Democratic Party (Hawai‘i) 130–31, 146 Dening, Greg 17–18, 32–33, 186 dependency 21, 67, 139, 186 depopulation 31, 46, 50, 67; see also contact, diseases, genocide Derrida, Jacques 41 desire: for complete disclosure 122–23, 127; effect of disciplines on 23, 183, 198; fiction and 19, 23; heterosexual 70, 104, 153, 157–58; imperial desire 157–58; to possess 105, 169; for purity 117, 126; same-sex 37, 44, 104, 189, 198; see also fetishism, oppositional reading development 8, 13, 19, 21, 26, 78, 108, 123, 124, 135, 195; into adulthood 47, 123, 126 (see also Bildungsroman); critiques of (see also carnivalesque, magic realism, traumatic realism); of land 106–107, 131–37, 143, 147 (see also plantation colonialism); “progress” 66–67, 74, 88, 123, 127, 145; DHPG (Deutsche Handels und PlantagenGesellschaft der Südsee Inseln zu Hamburg) 9, 10, 68; see also Jaluit Gesellschaft diaspora 7, 14, 15, 16, 147, 180, 184, 186 Diaz, Vicente xiv, 186, 187 Dirlik, Arif 188 disciplines 20–24; see also anthropology, history, law, psychoanalysis, science discoordination 20 discourse: knowledge production and 23, 24; naturalization of imperialism and 154; role in producing reality 21, 24, 93–97, 141, 154, 160–63, 177–78; “hermeneutical delirium” 141; see also disciplines, language diseases 191–92; contact and 166; cultural loss due to 31–32, 50; influenza pandemic of 1918 (“Spanish Lady”) 65, 70, 86–89; and traumatic repetition 87–88; influenza epidemics 41, 88; racial degeneration 49–50, 55; resistance movement as response to 86–88; pneumonia 49, 50; smallpox 31; tuberculosis 31, 50, 65, 74, 86; see also sexuality dismemberment 162, 166, 197 dispossession 14, 15, 22–23, 25, 43, 46–47, 49–50, 87, 102, 131, 141, 151, 174, 181; land and 22, 25, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50; see also Treaty of Waitangi Dole Foods 139, 195 Dole, Sanford 46, 184 Dominican Republic 138 Dominis, John O. 54

dreams 97, 107, 124, 176, 199; trauma and 18, 101, 121–23 Duff, Alan 183, 193 During, Simon 194 Dyson, Linda 160, 198 Edmond, Rod 76, 88 Elbert, Samuel H. 40, 42–43, 189, 195, 196 Elleray, Michelle xiv, 174 empire 43, 131, 140, 159, 174; British 53, 112, 160, 168, 170, 172, 174; liberal ideology and 130–31, 140; nation and xiii, 14, 20, 179; trauma and xiii, 12, 18, 21, 26, 117, 141; U.S. 59, 130–31, 135, 180; see also imperialism Enloe, Cynthia 139, 195 entanglement 16, 26, 79, 100, 114, 117, 120, 124, 133–34, 147, 155, 168, 180–81, 188, 192 entitlement, Hawaiians 49 epistemology 23–24: genocide and 59; hō‘ailona as forms of 61–62; indigenous xiii, 19, 20, 34, 36, 39, 61–62, 180, 183; skin signs as 34, 36, 59; visions 61–62; see also hō‘ailona, ‘ili ‘ōuli, signs ethnic studies (U.S.) 7 ethnography 19, 53; contact and 32–33, 36; critique of, in literature 19, 20, 97, 125; objectification of self 33–35, 38–39; see also anthropology, intertextuality eugenics 47–51, 54–59; see also degeneration European Community 84, 157, 160 evangelicism 26, 108, 109–10, 113–16, 161, 181; role in colonization 26, 44, 69, 110, 113–16, 167, 181; see also Christianity everyday practices 12, 15, 22, 23, 64–65, 90; see also card games, genealogy, jokes, pidgin, storytelling, tales exchange: indigenous borrowing 105–106; see also thievery exile 74, 80–84, 109, 111–12, 170, 193; see also penal transportation existentialism 80 fa‘a Sāmoa 65–66, 202; Christianity and 69–70; communal land tenure under 69; incorporation of western forms 64–65, 69–70, 76–77, 79, 83, 90, 91–92, 98; malecentered nature of 76–79; prestige and status in 65–69; women 72; see also chiefs, chiefly titles, feagaiga, prestige, status fa‘alupega 74–75, 79, 191, 202 fables: indigenization of 92 fāgogo 23, 92–94, 98, 181, 192, 202 fairy tales 23, 197; indigenization of 92; “Blue Beard” 26, 159, 165–67, 170–72, 174, 176–77, 197 family: alternative forms of 23, 26, 29, 36, 74, 101, 107, 113, 115, 127, 179; Christianity and 114–15; colonization’s effect on 16, 90, 104, 113–15, 169; gothic and 39, 42, 47, 49; Holy Family 115; indigenous forms of 29, 36,

224 Index 40–42, 70–71, 107, 115, 118, 190, 191, 203; nation and 12, 22, 107, 115, 156, 159, 161, 179; nuclear family 26, 76, 115, 117, 159–63, 169, 172, 174, 179; see also adoption, ‘āiga, ‘aumakua, community, fostering, genealogy, hānai, infantilization, luhi, paternalism, siblingship, tuakana, whanau Fanon, Frantz 153–54, 187; and “occult” 83–84, 86, 142, 152, 154 fantasy 13, 126; fantastic 21, 83, 95–97, 177; fantastical 126, 182, 188 fanua 71–72, 74, 202; see also land fascism 95–96 Faumuinā Fiame Mulinu‘u 79, 82, 85, 191 feagaiga 70–71, 78, 202 Fenians 112 fetish: commodity 105; fetishization of resistance 183; history as 52, 159, 174–79; imperial desire and 158; narrative fetishism 176–78; sexual fetishism 198; trauma and 26 fiction 23–24; disciplines and 22–27, 182–83, 188; history and 15–22, 39–47, 64–89, 101–20, 132–42, 158; Oceanic imaginary and 25; orality and 89–98, 150–55; see also intertextuality, magic realism, novel, traumatic realism Field, Michael J. 73, 79, 81–82, 86–88, 191 Figiel, Sia 14, 181 Fiji 1, 8, 71, 86, 191 Firth, Stewart 186 “Fiscal Envelope” 100, 157 Flores, Angel 96, 192 fono 68, 73, 76, 203 forgetting 180; nationalism and 26, 55, 89, 124; settler colonial nationalism and 110, 159, 174–79, 193, 198 Forman, Charles W. 69, 190 Forster, Johann Reinhold 102 Foster, Hal 187 fostering 99, 113, 115, 119, 194, 200; luhi 29, 36 Fourth World fi lmmaking 157 France 7, 8, 9, 122, 191 French Polynesia 11, 16, 186 Freud, Sigmund 33–34, 37, 42, 123, 187n frontier 1, 5, 17, 32–33, 55 Frow, John 188 Fujikane, Candace 195 Galumalemana Alfred Hunkin 191 games 19, 66–69; see also card games, jokes, genealogy, storytelling, oral tradition, plantation colonialism García Márquez, Gabriel: carnivalesque 153; magic realism 20–21, 26–27, 64, 95–96, 127, 188, 195; One Hundred Years of Solitude 21, 95, 140–42, 152–53; Melquíades 95; “outsized reality” 18, 96, 188 Garrett, John 69, 190 gathering rights 150; see also subsistence

gender: decolonizing of 15–16, 107, 181; fa‘afafine 108; fakaleiti 108; gendered aspects of colonization 104, 108, 172, 181; gendered nature of resistance 196; māhū 44, 49–50, 55, 59, 108, 143, 189, 195, 200; masculinity 47, 53–58, 196; see also Mana Wahine Maori, multiple dialectics of race and gender, women genealogy 22–23, 29, 180; adoption and 23, 29, 43; ancestry and 22, 60, 73, 83, 89, 107, 116, 117, 119, 178, 181, 184, 190, 199, 202; appropriation of 20, 23, 158, 181; authenticity and 118, 158, 198; biopiracy and 12, 182; capitalism’s effect on genealogy 88, 100; decolonization and 8, 29; diaspora and 14; disease 87–88; in fāgogo 92–94, 98, 181; family and 22–23, 29, 42, 60, 101; fostering 23; future action guided by 98, 101, 129, 181; genealogical alienation 116–17, 126–27, 178; genealogical discontinuity 12, 88, 90; genealogical graft ing 23, 26, 90, 91, 98, 172, 181; hair and 117, 197; Hawaiian notions of 22, 23, 29–30, 36, 39–42, 47, 56, 59–61; healing power of 101, 126–29, 181; historical epic 188; history and 23, 56, 60–61, 99; jokes and 24, 73, 90–93; land and 39, 47, 139, 156–57, 160–61, 169–73, 175–79, 181, 197; liberal humanist subject and 100, 116–17, 121, 123, 126, 140; liberal ideology and 89, 140; lived genealogy 26, 99–100, 107, 116–21, 181; luhi 29; magic realism and 22, 140; mana 56, 59; moko (tattooing) as 117; multiple parentage and 23, 40–43; myth and 22, 120, 188; naming 90; national future and 98, 180; nationalism and 23, 61; net as metaphor for 99, 120; Oceanic imaginary and 8, 180; place and 23; race and 25, 56, 59; restoring continuity to 91, 98; time and 61, 100–101; transforming 116–20, 126, 181–82; trauma and 22, 26, 116, 121, 129; traumatic realism and 22, 26; siblingship 115, 172, 174; web as metaphor for 22, 87, 116, 118–19, 121, 124, 182; see also ancestry, chants, fa‘alupega, family, ko‘ihonua¸ kū‘auhau, Kumulipo, mele inoa, multiple dialectics of race and gender, multiple parentage, oli, oral tradition, orator chiefs, pedigree, racialization, spiral, taka, whakapapa genocide 56–59, 63, 187; autogenocide 88; extinction by dilution 49, 55; “legal genocide” 25, 30, 55, 57, 59, 181; racial assimilation and 48–50, 55, 58, 59; racial degeneration and 48–50, 57; “self-slaughter” 56–59; trauma and 14, 31, 57, 63, 187; see also eugenics, HHCA geography: indigenous connection to 187; of Pacific Islands 1, 3, 5–7; see also land German colonialism 7, 9, 13, 67–68, 74, 130, 191; in Samoa 9, 10, 13, 67–68, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80–81, 84, 191; see also charter system:

Index 225 Freibriefen, DHPG, Jaluit Gesellschaft , Wilhelm Solf, Theodor Weber Germany: as imperial power 7, 9, 10, 13, 191; in Samoa 67–68, 73–74, 77–81, 84, 96; see also DHPG Geschwender, James A. 135 Gikandi, Simon xiv, 186 Gilbert, George 38, 189 Gilroy, Paul 7–8, 186n globalization 10–13, 21, 26, 67–68, 182, 184; “disembedding” 139–40; “fi nancial deepening” 139–40; “global market discipline” 138, 184; indigeneity and 182, 184; liberalism and neoliberalism 26, 131; local and 185, 195n; marginalization and 139–40, 184; “peripheralisation” 140, 142; relation to earlier colonialism 142–43; struggles against 26, 136, 187; see also local, magic realism, marginalization, multinational corporations Godeff roy and Son 67–68; see also DHPG, plantation colonialism in Samoa, charter systems Goldson, Annie 196 González Echevarria, Roberto 19, 20, 95, 97 Gordon, Suzy 198 gothic novel 25, 39–47; domesticity and 39–40, 43–45, 63; haunting 39; history of resistance and 39, 43–47; ongoing colonialism and 32, 63; primitive and 32, 41; race and genealogy 25, 32; trauma and 25, 31–47, 63, 189; uncanny and 32–34, 41–43 Goto, Katsu 147 governance 10, 110, 169–70, 182, 201; defin. of 169 Grace, Patricia xiv, 13–14, 181, 186; Baby NoEyes 13, 182; Cousins 14, 193n; Dogside Story 182; Potiki 13, 100, 182 Grant, Madison 48 Great Britain: in Hawai‘i 9, 10, 38–39; imperialism 7–9, 76, 158; postcolonial studies and 15 Great Fleet migration 125 Greenberg, Mark S. 34 Grey, Earl 191 Grey, Sir George 191 Guam 4, 16, 130, 186 Gurr, Edwin W. 82, 85 Gutíerrez-Jones, Carl xiv, 21 Haiti 138 Hālau o Kekuhi 182; Holo Mai Pele 182; Kamehameha: Nā Hō‘ailona 182 Halawa Valley 131 Hall, Stuart 15, 156 hānai 29, 36, 40, 43; see also adoption Hanakaulani-o-Kamamalu 54 haole 48, 55–56, 58, 132–32, 136, 139, 141, 144, 152, 196, 199; defi n. of 10, 199 hapa haole defin. of 25, 199; 25, 29–30, 33,

38–39, 47–63; see also Hawaiians, racialization Hardt, Michael 130 Hardy, Ann 159, 197 Hardy, Linda 197 Hasager, Ulla 149, 190 Hasegawa Komuten 131 Hau‘ofa, Epeli 1, 5, 77–78, 145, 153, 186; Oceania 1, 77–78; Oceanic imaginary 1, 5, 8; Tales of the Tikongs 145; “The Tower of Babel” 153 Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE) see pidgin Hawai‘i xiii, xvii, 3, 5–9, 10, 11, 13, 16–17, 25–26, 28–63, 108, 130–55, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189, 191, 194, 195, 199, 201; island of Hawai‘i 28, 30, 59, 147, 191; island of Maui 37; Kawaihae 47, 60; Kealakekua Bay 37, 41; Provisional Government 46; Territorial Period 14, 29, 47–63, 133, 196; Waimea 30, 33, 35–36, 39, 55; Waipi‘o 30, 41–42, 55 Hawaiian: ancestry xvii–xviii, 22–23, 28–29, 32, 60–61, 66, 186, 195, 200 (see also genealogy); defi nitions of xvii–xviii, 17, 25, 28–30, 32, 36, 39, 49–50, 100, 133, 143–44, 186, 200; identity 30–39; legally defi ned as wards of the state 144; maintenance of cultural identity 148–50; native Hawaiian xvii, 28–29, 49, 143, 180; Native Hawaiian xviii, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 25, 133, 144, 145, 149, 184, 186, 195, 196; origins of nation 59; part-Hawaiian 29, 33, 48–50, 52, 57, 131, 154, 196 (see also hapa haole); racialization of 133–34; see also blood quantum, HHCA, Kānaka Maoli, sovereignty Hawaiian Homes Land 11, 49–50, 131, 190 Hawaiian language 146, 182; banning of 11, 32; pronunciation of xvii; terms 199–201 Hawaiian Renaissance 13, 29, 31 Hawaīki 32, 100, 199 Helm, George, Jr. 14, 182 Hempenstall, Peter J. 67–68, 74 Henke, Suzette 192, 193 HHCA (Hawaiian Homes Commission Act) xvii, 24, 25–26, 28–30, 46–49, 50, 57, 133, 154, 181, 190; homesteading 46; incompetence 50, 131, 143–44, 154; legal genocide 49, 57, 181; mental incompetence 131, 141, 143–44; racialization in 26, 46–47, 49; rehabilitation of Hawaiians 49; reproductive incompetence in 144, 151; threat of extinction 31, 46, 49, 88, 133, 143; see also Hawaiian “hi-jacking” of narrative 93 Hinemoa 107–108 Hine-nui-te-po (Hina of the Night) 80 Hirabayashi v. U.S. 29 history 12, 17, 26; colonization 183; contact violence and 17–18, 32–33; identity and 31–39, 62, 121–28, 156–89; literate nature of 18, 73, 99, 121–28; literature and 19, 24, 64–65, 83–84, 183; objectification of past

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in 101; objectivity in 85; revision of 23, 95; settler nationalist 110, 129, 156–89; teleology of 43, 127, 155, 159; trauma and incomplete disclosure of 62–63, 183; see also fantasy, magic realism, postcolonial nation, “sideglancing historical eye,” traumatic realism, traumatic history, Hitler, Adolph 96; see also Holocaust, Nazism, totalitarianism Ho, Chinn 131 hō‘ailona 34, 36, 61–62, 181, 182, 190, 199; hihi‘o 190; hu‘ihu‘i 57; ōkakala 36, 200; ‘ūlāleo 190; see also epistemology, ‘ili ‘ōuli, signs hō‘ike 61–62, 199 ho‘i 40, 189; see also sexual practices Ho‘ohōkūkalani 40 ho‘omana 33–34; defi n. of 189, 200 Hobson, William 167–68, 196 hokonga 170, 201 Holocaust 14, 21, 117, 187; fascism and purity 117 Holt, John Dominis 30, 188, 189, 190; genealogy of 29–30, 32, 54; Recollections 30, 40, 54; Waimea Summer 12–14, 25–26, 28–63; Abrahama Hanohano 55, 59, 60; Albert Baxter 54–55; cattle 30, 56–59; Eben 54–55; Fred 30, 33, 35–36, 40, 42–45, 47, 9, 50, 55–57; goats 30, 35, 36; Julian 30, 34–36, 38, 40–47, 49–50, 53, 55–56, 190; Kimiko 57–58; Kroa 35–36, 51–55, 61; Mark 30–40, 42, 44, 46, 51, 53, 55–63; Miriam 30, 40–43; Puna 30, 36, 40–43, 45, 49, 53, 190; spider monkeys 35, 36, 51, 61; wildflowers 51, 53; wild pigs 30, 56 Holt, Owen Jones 54 Honduras 138–39, 140 Hoogvelt, Ankie 138–40 hu‘ihu‘i 57, 200; see also hō‘ailona, ‘ili ‘ōuli, signs Hui Malama Kai 150 hukihuki 36, 200–201 hula 42, 44 Huli (newspaper) 132, 137, 144, 148, 150–1 huli 151, 200 Hulme, Keri 12, 20, 25–26, 188; “A Drift in Dream” 121, 193; Te Kaihau/The Windeater 13, 182; see also The Bone People human rights 18, 25, 63, 138, 187 human-ness 40–41, 52–53 hybridity 13–16, 115, 188 identity 17, 18, 62, 91, 105, 186, 188; Hawaiian 17, 25, 30–39, 47, 55–56, 60, 63, 140, 148–49, 154–55; history and 31, 62; indigenous 25, 175, 187, 188; “local” 26, 133, 147, 196; Pakeha 26, 156–60, 173–74, 178–79, 182, 198; postcolonial 98, 108, 156; self-referentiality 116–17; trauma and 14, 17, 25, 47, 121, 194 Ihimaera, Witi xiv, 13, 108, 180, 182; The Dream Swimmer 13; The Matriarch 13, 182; The Whale Rider 13, 108, 180, 182

‘ili ‘ōuli (skin signs) defi n. of 36, 200, 201; 57, 59, 181; hu‘ihu‘i 57, 200; ōkakala 36, 201 illegibility of 31–32, 61; indigenization of western forms 64–65, 69–70, 76, 79, 83, 90, 91–92, 98; loss of 31–32; persistence of indigenous culture 24, 64, 84–85; reclamation of 17, 18; see also Christianity in Samoa illiteracy 141, 162, 164; as resistance 141, 145; see also orality, pidgin ILWU (International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union) 130, 136, 138, 147–48, 196 immigrant 16, 29, 41, 50–51, 112, 176, 194; alliance with natives 13, 25–26, 111, 131–36, 138, 144, 147, 150, 154, 173–74, 181, 186; laborers 10, 16, 25–26, 68, 134, 145–46, 181–86 imperialism 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10; British 158, 161; globalization 136; Japanese imperialism 136; role of corporations in empire 137–42; role of Japanese in 136; U.S. 5–7, 9–10, 11, 14, 26, 28–63, 50–51, 55, 57, 77, 130–55, 180, 181, 184; U.S. military and 9, 11, 14, 41, 50–51, 57–58, 130–38, 140; see also colonialism, colonization, empire, globalization, neocolonialism, settler colonialism, traumatic realism incest 43–46, 140, 153; prohibition 40–41, 53, 153 incompetence 50, 143, 154; see also HHCA independence 26–27; movements 10, 180; political xiii, 5, 9, 12, 26, 27, 184, 187, 189, 196; rejection of 83; Samoan 26, 65, 76, 82–85, 191, 192; settler colonial 179; see also Mau movement, sovereignty indigeneity 8, 15–16, 25, 29, 157, 187; alliance with settlers and immigrants 13, 26, 111, 131–36, 138, 144, 147, 150, 154, 173–74, 181, 186; appropriation of 13, 26, 88, 116, 157–58, 160, 179, 182, 193; assimilation of 29, 50–51, 195; genealogy and 14–15, 20, 22, 23, 29, 71, 80, 82, 104, 119, 125, 154, 181, 187; ongoing colonization and 14–16, 17, 22, 28, 32, 43, 63, 124, 181, 187; in postcolonial studies 9, 14, 15; relational model of 16, 25–26, 71, 156, 180, 188; and settler colonialism 156–59, 173–74, 180 indigenization 91, 92, 160, 176, 180 indolence laws 26, 134, 145–46, 148, 150, 154; see also laziness infantilization, colonial 72–80; of orators 65, 72; of wards 144–45 influenza see diseases insanity 131, 141, 143–44; see also incompetence, multiple personality disorder interdisciplinarity 22–27, 181–83, 188 intertextuality 23, 25; disciplines and fiction 22–27, 182–83, 188; fairy tale and fi lm 26, 159, 165–67, 170–72, 176, 197; fiction and

Index 227 orality 89–98, 150–55; history and fiction 15–24, 39–47, 64–89, 101–20, 132–42, 158; psychology and fiction 19, 24–26, 62–63, 99–100, 108, 121–29, 154, 181, 183 Irwin, Kathie 107, 193 iwi 11, 157, 180, 201; defi n. of 201; intra-tribal politics 182; land and 104–105, 126, 157, 169; see also Kai Tahu, Ngaati Kahungunu, Whakatohea Jacobins 112 Jaluit Gesellschaft 68 James, C. L. R. 184 Janet, Pierre 62 Japan 7, 9, 57–58, 130–34, 136, 138–39, 145, 147, 153, 188, 194 Japanese Americans 29; see also “local” Johnston Atoll 11 joker 91–93; see also card games, wild card jokes 24, 73, 90–93; see also pejoration Jolly, Roslyn 191 ka wā mahope (future) 61, 200 ka wā mamua (past) 61, 200 Ka‘ahumanu 44, 189 Ka‘iulani, Princess 54 Kaho‘olawe (island) 11, 14, 41, 132, 134, 182, 189, 196 kahu 59, 60–61, 200 kahuna 61, 148, 200 Kai Tahu iwi 13; settlement with Crown 26, 99–100, 113, 157 kaka 117 Kalākaua, King David 9 Kalama 45, 131–34, 144, 148, 151, 189, 190, 195 Kalani‘ōpu‘u 37–38, 59–60 Kalaniana‘ole, Prince Jonah Kuhio 49 kama‘āina haole 133, 194, 200 Kamakau, Samuel M. 44, 59–60, 189, 190 Kamalo-o-Leleiohoku 54 Kamapua‘a 56 Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikalā 23, 40, 41, 42, 44–47, 50, 56, 60–61, 184, 186, 189–90, 198 Kamehameha I 30–32, 36–37, 39, 59–61, 182, 189–90 Kamehameha III see Kauikeaouli Kamehameha Schools 133 Kanae, Lisa Linn 14, 181 Kanahele, “Bumpy” 195 Kanahele, Pualani Kanaka‘ole 41, 182, 196n Kānaka Maoli defi n. of xviii, 7, 29, 186; 7, 29, 131–32, 135, 149, 154, 184, 186, 195, 200 Kanaka‘ole, Nalani 182 Kāne, Herb Kawainui 1 kanikau 35, 189, 200 Kaomi 44–45 kaona 43, 45, 200 Kapi‘olani 9, 54 kapu 40, 60; kapu moe child 40, 45, 60; see also ‘aikapu

Karnes, Thomas L. 138, 195 Kauanui, Kehaulani xiv, 29, 49–50, 187 Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III) 9, 39, 41, 43–47, 49, 54, 57–59, 137, 189, 190 kawanatanga 167–68, 201; see also governance Keesing, F. M. 64; on Mau 83–84 Kelly, James L. 196 Kelly, Marion 133, 149 Kent, Noel J. 137–39, 196 Keōpūolani 189–90 Keōua Kuahu‘ula 34, 59, 60 Keōua Pe‘e-‘ale 59 Kevles, Daniel J. 48 Kido, Mitsuyuki 133 Kido, Pam Sachi 186 kinolau 41–42, 56, 200 kinship 40–43; see also ancestry, family, genealogy, siblingship Kīwala‘o 59 knowledge: imperial 3, 7, 19, 24, 37, 127; indigenous 13, 17, 33, 56, 61–62, 118–19, 189, 199; production 19, 23–25, 99, 183 ko‘ihonua 29, 200 Kohanga Reo National Trust 11 Kōkua Hawai‘i 132, 134, 144 Korn, Alfons 60 Krao 51–53, 190 Krystal, Henry 34 Kū 59–60, 61, 200 kū‘auhau 29, 200 Kuleana Act 149 kuleana lands defi n. of 200; dispossession by encroachment 133, 148–50; Māhele and 46, 137; subsistence on 137, 148–51; see also adverse possession, Māhele Kumulipo 182 labor: contract labor in Hawai‘i 134, 146–47; contract labor in Samoa 68, 78, 190; convict labor 109, 111, 170, 181; “docile bodies” 154; forced as punishment 74, 145–46; free labor 110–11, 147; immigrant labor on plantations 10, 15, 26, 67, 68, 134, 145–46, 181, 185; inadequate compensation for 171; indentured servitude 146; liberal ideology and 21, 46–47, 171; movement, Hawai‘i 130–31, 133–34, 138–39, 142, 196; prison labor 110 (see also penal transportation); sexual labor 70 (see also sexuality, sexual practices); strikes 138, 142, 146, 147; wage labor in Wendt 70–72, 137; see also Indolence Acts, Masters and Servants Act, surplus production LaCapra, Dominick 18, 62, 123 Lafoga Oloa 68, see also Oloa movement Lal, Brij 71 Lam, Maivan 149 land 5, 15, 19, 20; alienation of 8, 46, 67, 99, 105–106, 112, 144, 146, 150, 164, 169, 170–71, 182; ancestry and 159, 161, 178, 187, 197;

228

Index

biculturalism and 174, 187; chiefs and 44, 45, 67–69, 73; commodification 67, 71, 86, 156, 181; communal land tenure 46–47, 69, 72, 105, 134, 148–49; decolonization and 15, 27, 44, 46, 108, 181, 187; development of 106–107, 131–33, 137, 142–43, 150–52; dispossession xiv, 14, 21–22, 37, 43–44, 46–47, 50–51, 54–55, 59, 88, 102, 112, 131–33, 141–44, 149, 151, 169, 174, 181; dispossession by encroachment 149–50, 174; fertility of 42, 45, 108; genealogical relation to 139, 156, 159, 160–61, 169–73, 175–79, 181, 197; homesteading 49–50; indigenous claims to 8, 11, 15, 20, 22, 26, 32, 39, 46, 59, 99, 106, 113, 131, 143–44, 156–57, 170, 172, 179, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 194, 195; indigenous identity and 8, 14, 187; laws and use of 131, 143–44, 161, 181, 187; liberal cure and 46, 50; liberal individualism 21, 80, 117; privatization of ownership 25, 46, 67–69, 106, 131, 134, 149; productive 80; as property 15, 21, 46–47, 50, 80, 106, 132, 140–41, 144–45, 149, 156, 161, 168–70, 181, 187; reform 46, 131, 139, 148; revival of 41, 106–108, 114, 118, 129; stewardship of 15, 40, 106, 141, 147, 149; “unused” (fallow) 68–71, 80; “used” (cultivated) 68–71, 78, 80, 90; women as land 15, 71–72, 74, 101–108, 181; see also ahupua‘a, aloha ‘āina, Ceded Lands, continent, fanua, Hawaiian Homes Land, HHCA, kuleana, Kuleana Act, Lono, Māhele, mainland, mālama ‘āina, Papa, Papatuanuku, place, settlement, subsistence, Treaty of Waitangi, women, whenua language 50–51, 182, 197; alternatives to 163–65; aphasia 140–41; banning of 11, 32; English language and colonization 11, 26, 50–51, 154, 167–69, 171, 178, 181; metaphorical representation in magic realism 71, 72, 73, 76–77, 83–85, 93, 97–98, 101; native languages 11, 32; slippages in 153; trauma and 18, 32; tropes and cures 97; see also discourse, Hawaiian language, illiteracy, Maori language, orality, translation, unmediated communication Laplanche, J. 123 Lauaki Namulau‘ulu Mamoe 74, 81; see also Mau a Pule Laub, Dori 120 Laupepa 80–81 lava 79–80, 191 lāvalava 66, 72, 190, 203 law 19; anti-miscegenation 68; colonial 15–16, 24, 26, 187; contracts 159–61, 181; criminalization of resistance 67, 74, 133–35, 141, 143, 146, 152–53, 194; criminalization of subsistence 134, 148–50, 181; as discourse 24, 11, 141, 152; dispossession and 143–44, 146, 149; empire and 67, 109, 133, 140–41; fraudulent aspects of 5, 10, 159, 166–70;

international 187; legal protections 16, 187; trauma and 25, 31, 45, 180–81; see also adverse possession, Bayonet Constitution, HHCA, indolence laws, Kuleana Act, Māhele, Masters and Servants Act, Organic Act, Samoan Offenders Ordinance, Treaty of Annexation, Treaty of Waitangi laziness 69; eugenics and 55, 145; as form of resistance 145–46; paternalism toward natives 77–78; subsistence and 46, 69, 145; see also indolence laws le‘a le‘a see sexual practices Leaves of the Banyan Tree: death in 72–73, 87–89; Fanua 74; flying-foxes in 89; Galupo 25, 89, as aitu 91, and genealogy 91, 98; genealogical graft ing 23; genealogy and Pepe 72–73, 89–90, 91; history in 64–65, 84–85; Lafoga 68, 74–75; lions and aitu 69, 80–83, 154; Lupe 72–73, 75; maggots in 70, 89; Malo 65–66, 69–70, 72, 78, 81; Moa 65, 70, 72, 78, 90; naming in 73–75; Pepe 25, 65, 67, 69, 72–79, 81, 83–86, 88–91, 93; Pepesa 73, 76, 85, 89–90, 98; Sina 89–90; storytelling in 64–65, 83, 85; Tagata 65, 74, 80, 84, 90, 91; Taifau 73; Tane 89–90; Tauilopepe 25, 65–72, 74–81, 83–88, 90–93, 97–98, 191; Toasa 25, 65–74, 86, 88–91, 93, 98; Vaipe 65, 74, 81; see also Albert Wendt Lévi-Strauss, Claude 41 Lewis, Hal 133 Leys, Ruth 188 liberal ideology: genealogy and 89, 140; globalization and 26, 130–32, 137; liberal cure 46–47, 50; settler colonialism 21, 80, 117, 132, 140–41, 144, 161, 168–69, 181, 187 liberal individualism: land as property 15, 21, 46–47, 50, 80, 132, 140–41, 144, 161, 168–69, 181: naming and 90; patriarchy and 90; selfreferentiality and 117; women and 71–72, 74, 80 liberal subject 140; gender and 107; illiteracy as refusal of 141; law and 15–16, 21, 181, 186, 191 Lili‘uokalani 5, 9–10, 35, 46, 54, 146, 154, 186 Linmark, R. Zamora 14 Linnekin, Jocelyn 17, 188 literate 127–29, 141, 152; see also illiteracy, language Llosa, Mario Vargas 195 Lloyd, David 20, 43, 187 LMS (London Missionary Society) 69; see also Christianity in Samoa local: globalization and 12, 16, 136, 142, 155, 184, 188 “local” (in Hawai‘i) 3–7, 12, 21, 26, 31, 132–33, 136–37, 143, 150–52, 154, 194; defi n. of 133; activist movement 13, 26, 131–36, 138, 144, 147, 150, 154, 181, 195; communism and local activism 134–35, 195; community 20, 131, 143; diaspora 137, 147, 184, 186;

Index 229 as distinguished from Hawaiians 132–34, 154–55; fracturing of local movement 135–36, 148; identity 26, 133, 147, 196; as impurity (within sovereignty) 154; local Japanese 134, 147, 194; racialization of 133–34; writers 13–14, 136, 154–55; see also alliances, pidgin Locke, Elsie 193 Logan, Robert 87 Lono, Sam 148, 196 Lono: as chiefly name 41–43; god 38, 41–45, 47, 55, 189, 200 Loomba, Ania 184 Lord of the Rings trilogy 182 loss: of culture 31–32, 61; see also delegitimation, melancholia Lowe, Lisa 20, 47, 187, 196 Luangphinith, Seri 189 Luddites 112 luhi 29 Lum Darrell 135; “Paint!” 135 Luomala, Katharine 189, 191, 194 Mabinogion, The 120 MacNaughton, Malcolm 139 magic realism 12, 13, 16, 20–22, 25, 64–65, 73, 84, 86, 127, 137–42, 188, 198; allegory in 72, 92, 108; cosmopolitanism and 20–21, 26, 142, 183; critique of globalization 131, 135–43, 184; critique of liberal ideology 89, 130–32, 137–42, 191; critique of nation 12, 20–22, 181, 183; critique of plantation colonialism 21; development, critique of 20–21, 26, 78, 131–32, 134, 137, 143, 147–48, 150–51, 154, 195; discursive construction of reality in 20–22, 65, 73, 93–97; fabulation and 92; genealogy in 12, 22, 25, 72–73, 83, 85, 87–93, 98, 139–44, 149–52, 154; global flows and 16, 21, 26, 64–65, 67–68, 133, 136, 138–39, 142, 145, 154; history 12, 20–21, 23, 25, 64–65, 74, 80, 84, 86, 94, 96–97, 130–55, 188, 196; law in 137–50; magic 93, 97; memory and 82–84, 86; metaphors in 71, 72, 73, 76–77, 83–85, 91, 93, 97–98, 101, 141, 152–53; orality and 12, 20–22, 25, 64–65, 66, 73, 82–83, 141, 152–55; “outsized reality” 18, 21, 96, 188; parody and 19–20, 73, 78, 131, 141, 145 (see also pejoration); reader, textualization of 93–94, 192; reality and the fantastic in 96, 188; representation of resistance 141–42, 151–52, 183, 196; storytelling in 66, 83, 91–94, 98, 141, 153; testimony and 13, 83, 86, 151–52, 153–54, 158; theories of 21, 192; totalitarianism, critique of, in 95–96; translation and 16, 65, 75, 142, 152–53; traumatic history in 12, 15, 17, 20, 21, 96, 116, 181, 187; tropological cure in 97; see also Jorge Luis Borges, carnivalesque, marvelous real, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie

Māhele 25, 44–47, 49, 146, 200; dispossession and 46, 137, 148 Mahina, O. 71 mainland 3–7, 132, 136, 186, 194 maka‘āinana 40, 42, 145, 200 Makaha 131 Makahiki 42 mālama ‘āina defi n. of 40, 200; 147 Malietoa Tanumafi li 75, 81, 191 Malo 191 Malo, David 190 Mamdani, Mahmood 187 mana atua defi n. of 117, 201 Mana Wahine Maori 107 mana: biculturalism and 100, 156; chiefs and 40, 42, 45, 55, 192; cultivation of 42; defi n. of 40–41, 200, 201; genealogy, perpetuation of 40–43, 56, 59, 103, 105, 116, 117, 119; genealogical alienation and 116; land and 47, 71, 156 Mander, Jane 196; The Story of a New Zealand River 196 manifest destiny 49–51, 55–56 Maori 13, 99–130, 156–79, 180–84; defi n. of 194; authenticity and 126; genealogy 12, 20, 22–23, 99, 100, 108, 116–20, 129, 161; land and 10, 104, 106, 110, 156–57, 159, 161; Maori language (Te Reo) xvii, 11, 104, 128, 167; multiplicity of 124–25, 166; negotiations with Crown 11, 13, 124, 157; relations with non-Maori 111–13, 159; time 100; trade in women 22, 26, 100, 101–104, 192; usage of term 125; wars 83, 104; see also biculturalism, genealogy; sovereignty, Treaty of Waitangi Maori Land March 10, 99 Maori Language Act 11 marae 104, 120, 193, 201 Marcos, Ferdinand 139 marginalization 11, 141–50; under capitalism and globalization 139–40, 151, 184 Mariana Islands 7, 68; Saipan 74 marriage practices: absence of 40–42; capitalism and 105–106; contact and 101–102, 105; in eugenics 48; genealogy and 90, 116, 118; interracial marriages 48, 68; as legal contract 153, 159, 160–63, 168–71, 173, 177–79; marriage alliances 102–103; see also adultery, sexual practices Marshall Islands 4, 13, 22, 68, 191 martial law 81, 136, 138, 140, 191 marvelous real (lo real maravilloso) 20, 21, 64 masking 39, 43 Massé, Michelle A. 63, 189 Masters and Servants Act 24, 26, 134, 146 Matā‘afa Isoefa 81, 87, 191 Māta‘utia Karauna 82 matai 69, 76, 191, 192; defi n. of 68, 191, 203; colonial delegitimation of 69, 74, 79, 81–82, 86–87

230

Index

Mau 25, 64–65, 80–90; banyan as metaphor for 84; “Black Saturday” 82; criminalization of 82, 85; defi n. of 85–86; fa‘a Sāmoa and 83; genealogy of 85; infantilization of Mau 77, 79; Mau a Pule movement 74, 79–80; mysticism of 83–84; nationalism and 79, 83, 85–87, 89, 98, 191, 192; Oloa movement 68, 74; orator chiefs, centrality of 65, 74, 89, 98; passive resistance of 82–83, 85, 88; as persistence of Samoan culture 83–84, 85; problem of history and 85; as social disintegration and pathology 84; support for 79, 81–82, 85, 86, 191; as testimony to colonial repression 82, 86–89; see also the bush, F. M. Keesing, Lauaki, lava, Malo, O. F. Nelson, Samoan Offenders Ordinance Maui 80, 89, 120 mauri 106, 118, 125–26, 193, 201 Maxwell, Anne 190, 194 McCandless family 133 McClintock, Anne 22, 107 McGregor, Davianna 195 McKinzie, Edith Kawelohea 189, 201 melancholia 124 Meleisea, Malama 67–69, 71, 74, 76–83, 87, 190–92, 202 Melville, Herman 88; Typee 19, 88 Memmi, Albert 187 memory 13, 62, 120; forgetting 26, 55, 89, 110, 124, 159, 175–79, 193, 198; resistance and 13, 64–65, 80–84, 86, 149; see also the bush, lava Merry, Sally Engle 187 metropole 7, 8, 14–16, 20, 30, 137, 139, 181, 183 Micronesia, Federated States of 130 militarization 11, 14–15, 41, 50; New Zealand martial law in Samoa 81–82, 87; U.S. military 50, 57–58, 130–31, 136–40, 144; see also Bikini Atoll, Johnston Atoll, Kaho‘olawe, martial law, nuclear testing, weapons disposal Milner, G. B. 71, 74–75, 86, 190–91, 202 mimicry 25, 65–67, 69, 78–79, 105, 164–66, 172 MIRAB societies 12 missionaries see Christianity Mita, Merata 157; Patu! 157; Bastion Point— Day 507 157 mō‘ī (paramount chief) 43–44, 58, 189, 199, 201 modernism 21, 116, 126, 187, 193 modernity 7, 15, 19, 65–67, 78, 90, 181 moko 164, 198, 201 monarchy, Hawaiian: connection to British monarchy 9–10, 54–56, 59; loss of 46–49, 56, 59 Morales, Rodney 14, 181–82, 189n; When the Shark Bites 14, 181–82 Morel, Benedict-Augustin 48 mourning 124, 178 Moyle, Richard 92–93, 192 mua (past) 100, 201 multiculturalism 16, 156–57

multinational corporations 12, 14, 21, 136–42, 145–48, 154–55, 180, 184, 188, 195, 196 multiple dialectics of race and gender 25, 47–60, 180 multiple parentage 23, 40–43; po‘olua 43; punalua 43 multiple personality disorder 26, 131–32, 136–37, 139, 140–41, 145, 150, 154; as resistant strategy 141; see also trauma Murayama, Milton 14, 181 muri (future) 100, 201 Murphy, Geoff 157; Utu 157 music xiii, 97, 187; in contrast to language 128–29, 163–65, 177 muteness 161, 163–64, 172, 179, 192–93, 197; aphasia 140–41; enforced silence in prisons 109–10; trauma and 26, 109, 120–23, 158, 161, 176–78 Nāhi‘ena‘ena 44–51, 189 Najita, Susan Y. 189, 196 Nakata, Bob 134, 135, 148 naming 41, 73–75, 90, 92 Namulau‘ulu Pulali 74 Nandy, Ashis 187 Nāpo‘opo‘o-Hōnaunau 131 nation 12; imagined communities 127, 158; modernization, development and 8 nationalism: anti-colonial 12, 14, 20, 23, 43, 83, 87, 183, 185; antinationalism 7; critical 159; cultural 12, 13, 16, 17, 26, 27, 158, 183; deployment of difference in 156, 159; forgetting and 26, 55, 89, 110, 124, 159, 175–79, 193, 198; history 24, 110, 129, 156–89; identity 47, 127; indigenous cultural nationalism 8, 12, 13, 16, 26, 27, 129, 134–35, 157–58, 183, 185, 187, 195; national subject 19, 21, 47, 112, 162, 166, 170, 179, 180; official nationalism 12, 187; origins and 37, 59–61; popular nationalism 12, 21, 186–87; postcolonial 43, 91, 98, 157; settler colonial 13, 15–16, 23, 26, 110–12, 117, 124, 129, 156–89, 179; skepticism about 187; trauma and 19, 20, 60–63, 98, 180–81; see also community, magic realism, Mau, postcolonial nation nation-state: adultery 39, 40–43, 65, 70, 98, 190; erotic autonomy 26, 159, 161–63; family and 12, 22–23, 107, 115, 156, 159, 161, 179; gender and 16; monogamy 159–62, 179; patriarchy and 22, 108; sex and 26, 160–63 Native Schools Act of 1867 11 natural 160, 163, 197; languages 159, 163–65; world 135, 153 naturalization: of assimilation 46, 51; of colonialism 5, 47, 59, 154, 182, 197–98; of heterosexuality 197; of incest taboo 41; of patriarchy 22, 107, 108 Nazism 95–96 Negri, Antonio 130

Index 231 Nelson, O. F. 82–87 neocolonialism 11, 13, 16, 24, 26, 130, 131, 140, 154, 180, 183 New Guinea 4, 68, 180, 191 New Zealand 3–5, 7–11, 13–14, 65, 68, 72, 78, 81–86, 88, 99–129, 156–79, 182–84, 190–94, 196, 197; as colonizer 9, 81–90; selfgovernance 110–11; South Island 5, 9, 13–14, 15, 99, 100, 157; see also Aotearoa New Zealand Society 110 Ngaati Kahungunu 119 nī‘aupi‘o 40, 44, 46, 49, 189, 190, 201; defi n. of 40, 189, 201; see also pi‘o, sexual practices Nicaragua 138, 139 Niheu, Soli Kihei 134, 151, 195 nisei 133, 136, 194 Nordau, Max 48 nostalgia, imperial 158, 179 novel 18, 19; decomposition of 19, 121–29; discourses and 19; romance 159, 176, 178, 197; see also Bildungsroman, intertextuality nuclear testing 11, 13, 180, 186 Nukoli‘i 131 Nyman, Michael 163 Obeyesekere, Gananath 41 object: blurring of subject and 94 objectification 30, 33–35, 38–39, 41 Oceania xiii, 1, 77–78, 98, 180; as comparative model 5–7, 16; “new Oceania” 64, 97; Oceanic imaginary 1, 3, 5, 8, 25; translation and 16 OHA (Office of Hawaiian Affairs) 28, 29, 190 ōkakala 36, 201; see also hō‘ailona, ‘ili ‘ōuli, signs Okamura, Jonathan 133, 194–95 ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i see Hawaiian language oligarchy 10, 26, 54, 130, 133–34, 196; see also plantation colonialism Oloa movement (Oloa Kamupani) 68–74; see also Lafoga Oloa, Mau movement Once Were Warriors 183; see also Duff, Alan oppositional: defi n. of 182; oppositional reading 157, 182–85; oppositional subjectivity 182 oral tradition 19–20, 23–24; capitalism’s effect on 90; decolonization and 15, 128–29; depopulation, effect on 17, 31–32; fāgogo 23, 92–94, 98, 181, 192, 202; future action and 89–90; genealogy and 23, 72–76, 78–80, 89, 98, 181; kanikau 35, 189, 200; land, place, and 15, 161; magic realism and 20–21, 25, 64–65, 73; performance traditions and 181; provisional nature of 89; rebellion and 89–90; resistance and 12–13, 25, 89–90, 132, 141, 181; see also aurality, fa‘alupega, genealogy, jokes, kaona, magic realism, orality, orator chief, storytelling, tales, tusitala, whakapapa orality 17, 19, 23; aphasia 140–41; community

100, 127–29; critique of capitalism 151–54; critique of discourse 141, 183; oral/aural logic 150–54, 181; puns 151; place and 100; resistance and 73, 141, 151–55; “talking stink” 150–53; translation from oral to written 128–29; see also pidgin, magic realism Orange, Claudia 167, 196, 197 orator chiefs 25, 72, 73–74; genealogy and 73–75; land distribution and 73; resistance and 80; speeches of 72, 74; tūlafale 65, 73, 203; tu‘ua 65, 73, 75, 203; see also criminalization, fa‘alupega, infantilization, Lauaki, lava, “Mau a Pule,” oral tradition, orality, Pule, Tūmua Organic Act 147 origins: darkness, night 32–33, 73–80, 192; inauthentic 126, 158, 198; multiplicity of 124–25 127, 183; national 59–61; “void” 80; see also cosmogony, Hawaiki, pō Osorio, Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole 184, 187, 198 Ota Camp 131 “other”: ethnography and the 32–33, 26–27, 39, 52–53; colonialism and 55, 91, 94, 160, 163–64 Pacific Rim 8, 21, 142, 184, 188 Pacific Studies 3, 7, 188 PACOM (Pacific Command) see CINCPAC paganism 35, 42, 73 Pak, Gary xiv, 12–14, 23, 25–26, 131, 140, 142, 145, 147, 151–55; “An Old Friend” 135–36; A Ricepaper Airplane 147; “The Trial of Goro Fukushima” 147; “Valley of the Dead Air” 133, 143–44, 153; The Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories 14, 26, 131; see also “The Watcher of Waipuna” Pakeha: defi n. of 11, 160, 192, 196, 202; history 156–79; identity 26, 156–60, 173–79, 198; nationalism 156–60, 181; relations with natives 114, 120, 124–25, 159, 161, 164, 168, 170–74; settler colonialism 102, 114, 117–18, 129, 156, 174–79, 182, 198; state 99, 124, 129, 156, 173 Pakeha-Maori 102, 193, 198 Palau 4, 68 palimpsest 15, 168 Panama Canal 51, 138 panic response 34, 48, 57–59, 63 paniolo 30; defi n. of 189, 201 Pao, Joe 133 Papa 40, 74, 80, 107, 125, 201; Papatuanuku 104, 107, 125; see also gender, land, women papalagi (also pālagi) 66–67, 70, 77–79, 90, 91; defi n. of 67, 190, 203 Parker Ranch 30, 49, 54, 56, 189 Parker, Samuel 54 Parkhurst Prison 108–11 parody 19, 20, 65, 73, 78, 131, 141, 145 Parry, Benita 184

232

Index

paternalism, colonial 76–79, 85, 90; see also infantilization patriarchy: evangelicism and 161; family and 161–63; gothic and critique of 189; liberal 90; in Maori culture 108; nationalism 22, 108; in Samoan culture 69, 76–79, 85–90, 104; settler colonialism and 76, 78, 159, 161 Paulet, Lord George 9, 54 pedigree 23, 25, 28–30, 54, 56, 126; see also racial purity, racialization, whiteness pejoration, colonial 73, 145; see also jokes Pele 135 penal colonies 108–10, 112, 170, 193–94, 198 penal transportation 13, 22, 24, 26, 108–13; as “banishment” 109, 117; boy convicts to New Zealand 13, 26, 100, 108–14, 121, 180–81; criminal offenses leading to 112–13; in Australia 108–10, 112, 193–94; social movements against 111–12; terms of apprenticeship 110; see also body, convicts (boy), evangelicism, prisons, settler nationalism, traumatic history “peripheralisation” 140, 142; see also globalization Perkins, Reid 197 Philippines 130, 137–39, 140, 188 photography 52–53, 175; authenticity of 52–53, 118, 161–63, 171, 177–78, 198; body and 162; constructed reality through 161–63, 171, 177–78; materiality of 162 The Piano 16, 156–79, 183, 196, 197; Ada 26, 158–79, 197, 198; Baines 159–64, 166, 169–79, 197; Blue Beard 26, 159, 165–67, 170–72, 174, 176–77, 197; color in 175–76; Flora 158–59, 162–65, 169, 174, 177–79, 197; Maori characters in 159, 160, 164–66, 170–75, 196, 197; Morag 162–64, 172–73, 177–78; Nessie 161, 163–66, 172; novel of 158, 159, 175, 178, 181; Stewart 160–66, 168–73, 175, 177–79, 197; wedding photograph in 161–63, 171, 177–78 pidgin (Hawai‘i Creole English) 3, 24, 121, 131, 143, 151, 181; against liberal individualism 26, 132, 141; non-standard nature of 141, 152; resistance language 151–55, 181; role of in decolonization 3, 155; subsistence language 154, 181; “talking stink” 150–53; see also orality Pihama, Leonie 107, 160, 193 pi‘o 40–46, 54, 189–90, 201; see also sexual practices pipi laho (bull) 56–57 PKO (Protect Kaho‘olawe Ohana) 14, 134, 182 place: comparative approach to 3, 7, 8, 16, 183; genealogy and 23; global capitalism and 21, 138, 155, 185; indigeneity and 14–15, 20, 22, 23, 29, 71, 80, 82, 104, 119, 125, 154, 181, 187; layering of histories in 15, 21, 100, 157–58, 168, 180; oral tradition and 29, 89; placebased reading 16, 20–21, 180 plantation colonialism 9, 14, 21, 72, 77, 80, 91,

142; in Hawai‘i 10, 11, 25–26, 47, 49, 130–34, 137–38, 142–50; in Samoa 9, 10, 25, 65–72, 76, 78, 84, 91, 191n; see also “The Big Five,” DHPG, surplus production pō 32–33, 43, 73, 80, 192, 201 “pom” or “pommy” 118, 194 po‘olua 43, 210 Point Puer Boys’ Establishment 109, 113 Polynesia 3, 7, 15, 22, 125 Polynesian 11, 22–23, 31, 53, 76, 80, 84, 88–89, 105, 125, 192, 194 Pompallier, Bishop Jean-Baptiste 8 Ponape 68 Pontalis, J. B. 123 postcolonial nation 7, 14, 18; ambivalence of 91, 98; appropriation of oral traditions and 66, 90, 98; forgetting of colonial past 26, 159, 175–79, 193, 198; incorporation of colonial culture 98; indigenous 157; oral traditions and 90; reconciliation within 8, 10, 100, 156, 179; revision of history 95; see also genealogical graft ing postcolonial studies 9, 14, 15 poverty 47, 50, 55; see also dispossession prestige 65, 69; chiefly rivalry and 65, 69–70, 78; via capitalism 97; see also fa‘a Sāmoa, status primitive: appropriation of 88; medicine 97 primitivization 39, 41–42, 54–55, 60–62, 160; of Maori 160; myth of dying native 88; science and 35, 51–53, 97; trauma and 35–36; uncanny and 32–35, 41, 47, 51; see also wildness prisons: conditions 109–10; sexual practices in 110, 193 property 105–106, 130–55; contact relations and 38, 103; land as 15, 21, 46–47, 50, 80, 106, 132, 140–41, 144–45, 149, 156, 161, 168–70, 181, 187 Pryor, Ian 196, 197 psychoanalysis; critique of 19, 99, 108, 123–24, 126–27, 154; novels and 19; poised or suspended attention 123; trauma and 18, 24, 26, 62–63, 122, 123; see also countertransference, transference, trauma PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 18, 34; see also shellshock, trauma Pu‘u Koholā Heiau 30, 34, 59–61 pua‘a laho 56–57 Puerto Rico 130 puhi 103, 202 Puig, Manuel 195, 198 Pukui, Mary Kawena 36, 40, 43, 57, 60–61, 189–90, 195–96 Pule 73–74, 80, 83, 192; see also orator chiefs, Tūmua Pule, John 14 punalua 43, 44, 201 race 28, 29, 102; racism 97; see also multiple dialectics of race and gender

Index 233 racial assimilation (whitening) 48–50; see also whiteness racial degeneration 48–58 racial hysteria 48 racial mixing 29, 33, 38–39, 47–63, 54; laws in Samoa 68; mongrelization 48 racial purity 25, 28–29, 54, 56; see also pedigree racialization 14, 28–30; genealogy and 23; laws and 68, 133–34; “legal genocide” 25, 30, 55, 57, 59, 181; racial classification 53; see also legal genocide Raglan 11 rahui 120, 194 ranching 28, 30, 47, 49, 54–57, 133, 143, 189 rangatiratanga: defi n. of 196, 202; 157, 167–68; see also sovereignty Ratana 113, 115 Raureti, Moana 113 reading practices 23, 93–95, 127; place-based 16, 21; “side-glancing historical eye” 24, 43, 46–47, 182, 185; witnessing and 21, 25, 141, 152, 182, 183, 185; see also oppositional reading realist novel 19, 20, 65, 94, 187 reality: discursive construction of 21, 24, 94–97, 141, 154, 160, 162–63, 177–78; fiction and 34, 94–98, 165, 170; “outsized reality” 18, 21, 96; trauma and 63; see also magic realism, marvelous real, surrealism, traumatic realism reconciliation 8, 10, 18, 63, 100, 157, 179 Renan, Ernest 198 reproduction: aborted birth 89–90; death of child 72–73; as form of consumption 104; gender and 16, 26, 78–79, 81; inability to 48, 50, 56, 58, 143, 154; nation and 26, 108, 159–63; refusal of 104, 117; sexual diseases and contact 31; see also aitu, ‘alu ‘alu toto, genealogy, HHCA, incompetence, land, sexual economy, sexual practices, sexuality, women resemblances 26, 40, 43, 46, 89, 163–74, 198 resistance 12, 20, 182; criminalization of 38, 66, 74, 85, 90, 109, 112, 117, 124, 135, 148, 181; gendering of 196; histories of 24, 43–58, 62, 74–85; marginalization of 141, 143; memory of 13, 64–65, 80–84, 86, 149; mimicry as form of 25, 64–69, 78–79, 105, 172; and testimony 151–52; witnessing as 173; see also magic realism Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) 135 Rice v. Cayetano 28, 195, 196 Rice, Freddie 28, 49 Richardson, George Spafford 68–69, 78–79, 81–82, 85, 191 Robertson, A. G. M. 49 Ross, Andrew 55 Rothberg, Michael 21, 187 Rudé, George 113, 194 rumor 67, 131, 143, 151

Rushdie, Salman 19, 20, 26, 127, 142; on magic realism 142; and the postcolonial novel 19–20 Russ, Joanna 189 Rutledge, Art 133 Sahlins, Marshall 22, 41, 188 Said, Edward 184 Saldívar, José David 20–21, 73, 142 Salmond, Anne 117, 118, 197 Samoa 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 13; Apia 9, 67, 78–79, 81, 86–87, 88, 92; Fa‘a‘ai 79; Foalalo 79; German control of 9, 10, 13, 67–68, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80–81, 84, 191; global capital in 12; Great Britain in 9, 69, 74, 76, 77, 81; Manu‘a 9; Matāvanu 79; Mulinu‘u 70, 81; New Zealand in 9, 13, 65, 67, 72, 78, 81–88; Sale‘aula 79–80; Samoan language xvii, 202–203; Savai‘i 9, 79, 81, 86; Tuasivi 79, 86; Tutuila 9; Upolu 9, 65, 67, 81; U.S. control of 9, 74, 77, 81; Vaea, Mt. 81 Samoan Offenders Ordinance 81–82 Samwell, David 37 Sanchez, George J. 186 Santner Eric 121, 176, 178 Scarano, Tommaso 96, 192 scientization 53 sea 5, 15, 19, 135, 162, 167, 189, 175, 190, 194, 207, 208; subsistence and access to 139, 149–50; see also Oceania, Oceanic imaginary Segal, Naomi 198 self-determination 7, 12, 16, 17, 63, 84, 142, 144, 184 settlement 10, 13; in New Zealand 8, 9, 163, 174, 178–79, 181; “Systematic Colonization” 8; see also land settler colonialism 9, 15, 26, 187, 197–98; class and 111; domesticity and 55, 174; in Hawai‘i 26; indigeneity and 16, 23, 25–26, 124, 156–59, 173–74, 176, 180, 186, 188; nationalism 13, 15–16, 23, 26, 110–12, 117, 124, 129, 156–80; in New Zealand 8, 10, 23, 25–26, 109–11, 117, 124, 129, 156–80, 197–98; in Samoa 9–10, 67–68 sex: contact relations and 22, 26, 30–31, 36, 40, 42, 101–103, 194 sexual economy: commodification of sexuality 101–105, 129, 181; trade in Maori women 22, 26, 100, 101–105, 117, 192 sexual identity: coming of age 47, 55–59 sexual practices 36, 39, 40, 110, 193; banning of 44–45, 58; chiefly “incest” 40–46, 49, 54, 189–90, 201 (see also ho‘i, nī‘aupi‘o, pi‘o); degeneration and 46, 49, 56–57; disease and 31, 46; erotic autonomy 26, 159, 161–63; le‘a le‘a 42, 44, 46, 57–59; monogamy 159–62, 179; multiple matings 40, 42; multiple parentage 40–43, nation-state and 160–163; po‘olua 43, 201, primitivization of 42, 44–45; punalua 43–44, 201; as resistance 57; see also

234

Index

fetishism, gender, marriage practices, sex, sexuality, women sexuality: adultery 39, 40–43, 65, 70, 98, 190; aikāne 37, 42, 44, 55, 59, 189, 190, 199; ambiguity of 101; asexuality, neuter 101, 104–105, 108; awakening, sexual 159–60, 163, 171–72, 196; bisexuality 108; decolonization of 15, 16, 55, 58, 108; eugenics and 48–49, 54–59; fa‘afafine 108; fakaleiti 108; fertility and god Lono 42; heteronormativity and colonization of 107–108, 159; hoa takatāpui 107–108, 201; homosexual desire 58, 104, 107–108; homosexuality 55, 76, 104–105, 107–108, 110, 143, 189, 200; māhū 44, 49–50, 55, 59, 108, 143, 189, 195, 200; see also gender, reproduction, sexual pleasure, sexual practices, women shaman: traumatic history and 97 shark 60, 190; see also ‘aumakua Sharp, Andrew 112, 156, 167–70, 193, 196, 201 Shaw, A. G. L. 112, 113, 193, 194 shellshock 63, 136; see also PTSD siblingship 40, 118, 166, 172, 174 signs (“supernatural”): hihi‘o 190; hō‘ike 61–62, 199; hu‘ihu‘i 57, 200; illegibility of 34, 36; ōkakala 36, 201; revelation of 61–62; skin signs 35–36, 57, 59, 181, 200, 201, ‘ūlāleo 190; 199; visions 61, 181, 190; see also epistemology, hō‘ailona, ‘ili ‘ōuli Silva, Noenoe K. 184, 198 Simmons, D. R. 120 simulacra 95, 178 Sinclair, Keith 167 Smith, Cheryl 160 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 104, 107 Smyth, A. G. 82, 85 social class 137, 59; bourgeoisie 111, 140, 162–63, 174, 197–98; lower class 162, 190; race and 112, 132–35, 138, 148, 155, 195; working class 190 Solf, Wilhelm 68, 73–79, 191 Soloway, Richard 48 Somoza, Anastazio 139 Sorrenson, M. P. K. 143 sound 128–29 sovereignty 7–8, 12, 20–21, 27, 183; abrogation of Maori chiefly 168–69, 197; Hawaiian sovereignty movement 7, 10, 14, 16, 30, 63, 131–32, 135, 147, 154, 184, 186, 187, 189, 195; Ka Lāhui 195; legal defi n. of 168; Maori sovereignty movement 8, 11, 25–26, 124, 157, 160, 179, 182; see also rangatiratanga, Treaty of Waitangi, Treaty of Annexation spiral (taka) 128, 202; genealogy 120; time and 100–101, 116; see also taka Springbok Tour 11 St. George 110 Standard Fruit and Steamship Company 138–39, 195 Stannard, David E. 31, 50, 186

status: achievement of, colonialism’s effect on 79, 90; chiefly rivalry for 65, 69–70; see also fa‘a Sāmoa, prestige Stead, C. K. 126 Stevenson, Robert Louis 77, 80, 88, 190, 191 stewardship over land 15, 106, 141, 147, 149; see also land, mālama ‘āina, subsistence Stillman, Amy Ku‘uleialoha xiv, 184, 188, 189, 198 storytelling 24, 153–54, 183; genealogy and 24, 89, 181; novel and 19, 158; performative aspects of 158, 177–78, 192; resistance and 21, 24, 64, 73; tusitala 91, 93, 98, 192; versions of stories 89; see also Jorge Luis Borges, fāgogo, genealogy, oral tradition, tales Stratton, Jon 187, 188 Strong, Rev. Josiah 50–51, 190 subaltern 15, 47 subject: hybrid 188; imperial subject, formation of 47; law and 10, 15, 112, 139, 140, 157, 166, 170, 180–81; liberal humanist subject 15, 100, 116, 121, 123, 126–27, 140, 180–81; national 19, 21, 47, 112, 162, 166, 170, 179, 180; object and 24, 30, 38–39; object and, blurring of 93–94; resistant 61, 134, 180, 182; trauma and 19, 21, 63, 180, 187 Subramani 80, 92, 192 subsistence 15, 25, 28, 149–54, 181; capitalism and 18, 65–69, 71–72, 105, 139, 144, 153–54; criminalization of 46, 74, 134, 145–50, 134–35, 181; globalization and 137, 139, 140, 144; marginalization of 140, 150–51; pathologization of 150–51; “unused” land 68–71, 80; see also aloha ‘āina, bush, kuleana, mālama ‘āina, plantation colonialism, stewardship, surplus production Sumida, Stephen 189 surplus production 15; cultivation of land 68–72; globalization and 145; law and 15, 68, 133–34, 143, 150, 154; liberal subject and 181; refusal of 79–80, 106, 151–52, 154; see also development, lava, plantation colonialism surrealism 20 taka defi n. of 120, 128–29, 202; see also spiral tales 26, 82–83, 89–95, 98; tale-telling 159, 162, 176–78, 192, 198; see also fairy tales, storytelling tamā 76, 78, 85, 90 tangata Maori 125; defi n. of 194, 202 tangata tupua 125 tangata whenua 106, 156, 173; defi n. of 193, 202 taonga 12, 169, 202 tattooing 117; see also moko taua 103, 202 taulasea or taulaitu (spirit mediums) 190; see also ‘alu ‘alu toto Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia 104, 107–108 Te Reo (the Maori language) xvii, 13, 104, 201–202

Index 235 Teaiwa, Teresia xiv, 146, 186 teleology 12, 43, 47, 122, 127, 155, 159, 195 Temaru, Oscar 186 temporality: contact and 1, 20, 100; history and 80–85; indigenous 42, 61, 71, 100, 200, 201; layered 42, 100; “temporal distancing” 34, 53, 61; traumatic 47, 159; see also genealogy, history, time testimony 13, 119; to colonial oppression 86, 151, 154, 183; fiction and 13, 62, 86, 152, 181, 183; Mau as 86, 89; orality and 83, 86, 151–52, 153–54, 158, 181; working-through and 62 Thaman, Konai 192 thievery 38–39; burglary and resistance 83, 90; convict practices of 106 Thomas, Nicholas 172, 188, 190, 192 Thomas, Richard, Admiral 9 Tiffi n, Helen 194 time: Hawaiian notions of 61, 200; Maori notions of 100–101; see also genealogy, ka wā mamua, ka wā mahope, mua, muri Tobin, Jeff rey 188 tohunga 168, 202 Toleafoalagolago 87 Tonga 1, 31, 71, 108, 145, 191 totalitarianism: critique of, in magic realism 95–96 totality 62 tourism 11, 13, 131, 136–37, 139, 147, 148; golf courses 11, 131, 132, 191; realism and 19, 20; resorts 11, 137, 191 tradition 73; authenticity and 17, 124–25; delegitimation of 17, 44, 124–25, 181; multiplicity of 125; see also oral tradition transference 122–23 transitional object 121 translation 162, 164; colonization and 158–59, 164, 167–69, 197; deceptive nature of 128, 159, 163–67, 170–73, 177, 181, 197; kaona and 57, 121, 128; literate to oral 128; magic realism and 16, 75, 142, 152–53; of native languages 107, 112; of oral mode 152–53, 127–29; oral/aural 152; as resistance 147, 153; settler to nativist 158–59; see also Treaty of Waitangi Trask, Haunani-Kay 11, 17, 28, 132, 134, 144, 181, 186, 187, 190, 195 Trask, Mililani 187 trauma 24; body and 18, 22, 31, 34–37, 57; colonization 22, 63, 180–81; contact and 21, 25, 32, 36–39, 101, 180–81; contradictions of empire and 136, 141, 181; dreams and 18, 34, 36–39, 61, 101–103, 121–23, 176; ethnographic history and 32, 36, 38; ethnographic trauma 38; genocide and 14, 31, 57, 59, 63, 187; healing 23, 26, 62–63, 98, 119, 124; history 18, 19, 20, 60–63; human rights atrocities and 18, 25, 63, 138, 187; incomplete disclosure of history 121–24,

126–27, 183; incomplete psychological disclosure 123, 126–27, 183; influenza epidemics 87–88, 192; intergenerational 22, 63, 100, 102, 120; “kernel” 18–19, 120, 122; language and 18, 32, 62–63; law and 25, 31, 45, 180–81; loss and 31–32, 35–36, 58–61; memory and 120, 122; origins and 19, 99, 110; panic response 34–35, 48, 57–59, 60–63; parody of 141; “partial trauma” 34, 62; pathologization of 18, 22, 59, 63, 123; race and 25, 31; repetition of 18, 47, 49, 62–63, 87–88, 96; subject–object distinctions in 39; surrealism and 20; “talking cure” 120; temporality, time and 159; traumatic silences 159; unintegrated aspects of 62–63; see also counter-transference, multiple personality disorder, PTSD, testimony, transference, transitional object, traumatic history, the unconscious, witnessing, working-through traumatic history 12, 14, 15, 17, 18–21, 38, 97, 109–10, 116, 121, 187; historical residue 22, 109, 121, 188; place and 100 traumatic realism 25–26, 34–47, 63, 100–102, 121, 124, 181; defin. of 12–13, 21–22, 187; absence of disclosure in 121–24; critique of development 106, 123–24, 126–27; critique of discourse 121–29; critique of psychoanalysis 62–63, 122–27; cultural delegitimation and 34, 43–47; genealogy in 22, 26, 116, 121; history and 22, 43–47, 100, 181; Holocaust and 21, 187; individual development 123, 126; ongoing colonization and 12, 17, 21–22, 28, 32, 43, 63, 124, 181, 187; see also intergenerational trauma, trauma, traumatic history travel narrative 19, 20 Treaty of Berlin 9, 77, 81 Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act 157 Treaty of Waitangi 8, 10, 24, 102, 110, 110, 112, 156–57, 168–70, 173, 193, 197; appropriation of Maori land 110, 169–70, 181; articles of 168–70; biculturalism 156–57, 179; as contract 10, 24, 161, 168, 181; deception of 10, 12, 159, 166–71, 177, 181, 197; missionary role in 167–68; terms of 168–70; translations of 167–71, 178, 197 tu‘ua 65, 73, 75, 203; see orator chiefs tuakana 115, defi n. of 194 Tuaopepe, Mele 92 Tuimaleali‘ifano 82 tūlafale 66, 73, 203; see orator chiefs Tūmua 73–74, 80, 83, 192; see also orator chiefs, Pule tupu (king) 80 Tupua Tamasese Leaofi III 81–82 tūpuna 173, 202 Tupuola Malifa 191 tusitala 91, 93, 98, 192; see also fāgogo, storytelling tūtūa 118, 202

236

Index

uncanny, the 15, 31–34, 41–47, 61 unconscious 23, 122–23; trauma and 22–23, 37, 53, 62, 122–23, 173, 179 Unilever 139 United Fruit 138–39, 142, 195 United Nations decolonizing List of Non-SelfGoverning Territories 131, 195 United States imperialism 5–7, 9–10, 11, 14, 28–63, 51, 55, 57, 77, 130–55, 180, 184; military presence 9, 11, 14, 41, 50–51, 57–58, 130–38, 140; Standard English and 11, 26, 50–51, 154, 181 unmediated communication 164–66, 173, 176–77, 179 uru 117 utu defi n. of 103, 104, 193, 202 utu pihikete 102 vā 71 Va‘ai, Sina 71, 98 vampirism 101–104 van Allen, William 148 van der Kolk, Bessel A. 34, 62 Van Diemen’s Land 109, 111–12 Vancouver, Captain George 38, 59 victim 18, 19, 32, 38–39, 63, 70, 88, 99, 111, 117, 174 Victoria, Queen 9–10, 54, 166, 168, 170 Vietnam 131, 136–37, 140 violence 72, 166; colonialism and 15, 26, 63, 78, 88, 197; contact and 18, 30–32, 37–39, 103, 197; domestic violence 78, 103–105, 114–15, 166, 192; economy of violence 103–105, 114–15; epistemological 34, 123; to genealogy 88, 182; histories of xiv, 18, 198; see also abuse, body, genealogy, traumatic history voyaging (canoe) 1, 8, 100, 174, 178 Waiāhole-Waikāne 131–35, 142 Waiahole-Waikane Community Association Waipi‘o 30, 33, 42, 55 Wairaka 108 wairua (bone person) 107, 126, 194, 202 Waitangi Tribunal 99, 161 Wākea 40–41, 46, 201 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 8 ware 116, 202 “The Watcher of Waipuna” 20, 130–55; Fogarty 131, 152–53; “frogmen” 131, 136, 152–53; frogs 141, 152–53; Gilbert 26, 131–32, 136–37, 139, 140–41, 143, 145, 147–55; HIC 131, 136–37, 139–41, 143, 145, 152–54; illiterate in 141, 143, 145; Jacob Ho‘okano and land 133, 143–44, 148–51; Lola 131, 139, 141, 143–44, 150–51, 196; Lucy 131, 139, 151–54; magic realism in 132, 137–40, 142, 152, 181; mental

incompetence 131, 141–44, 150; Nakakura 131, 136, 143, 147–48, 152, 154; reproductive incompetence in 143–44, 151; resistance in 131, 152–54; subsistence in 140–41, 143, 145, 149–52, 154; trauma in 26, 131–32, 136–37, 139, 140–41, 145, 150, 154; see also “local,” multiple personality disorder Weber, Theodor 67–68 Wendt, Albert 192; Black Rainbow 14; on magic realism 25, 64–65, 84; “new Oceania” 64; Ola 14; “Pint-size Devil on a Thoroughbred” 85; Sons for the Return Home 14; “What you do now, brother? (to a casual worker)” 101–102; see also Leaves of the Banyan Tree whakairo 119, 202 whakapapa (Maori genealogy) 20, 22, 99; authenticity and 118, 119; defi nition, meanings of 100, 118, 202; history and 100; land claims and 161, 172; narration and 100; place and 100; see also genealogy, time Whakatohea iwi 157 whānau (extended family) 107, 119–20, 127, 193, 202 wharenui (ancestral house) 107, 119–20, 127, 193, 202; carvings (whakairo) in 120 whenua 104, 194, 202; see also land, women whiteness 156–58, 160, 167, 174, 179, 198; American-ness and 49–51, 54–57; Britishness and 53–54; competing forms of 47–60 wildness 51–53, 55–60, 99, 111, 116 Williams, Henry 167–68 Williams, Herbert W. 107, 115, 118, 120, 193, 194, 196, 201 Wilson, Rob xiv, 7, 136, 186, 188, 190 Windward Partners 133, 135 Witeck, John J. 132, 134, 136 witnessing 21, 25, 86, 119–20, 141, 159, 173, 181, 183, 185; see also trauma women: commodification of 102–104, 129, 181; land and 71–72, 74, 80, 104, 108, 181; marriage alliances 102–103; reproduction and nation 26; sex trade in Maori women 22, 26, 100, 101–104, 192; see also gender, Mana Wahine Maori, sexual economy, sexuality working-through 62, 119–120, 122, 124 World War I 9, 20, 68, 87 World War II 9, 12, 29, 58, 136, 184 Wyllie, Robert C. 46, 50, 190 Yamamoto, Eric 195 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann 14, 181 Yoneda, Karl 147 Young, John 37, 190 Yuval-Davis, Nira 160 Zimmerman, Marc 86

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