“Our stories could kill you”: Storytelling, healthcare, and the legacy of the “talking cure” in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998) and Georgia Kaʻapuni McMillen’s School for Hawaiian Girls (2005)

ABSTRACT

The notion of indigenous intergenerational historical trauma, developed by Native American engagements with trauma studies, has influenced bicultural or multicultural healthcare systems in New Zealand and Hawaiʻi. Beliefs that indigenous storytelling facilitates healing underpin these discourses, a premise shared by postcolonial trauma scholarship addressing Pacific literatures. This article questions underlying – and romanticized – arguments that Māori and Hawaiian storytelling heals. It analyses how storytelling is re-envisioned as a potential rather than realized space of healing in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes and Georgia Kaʻapuni McMillen’s School for Hawaiian Girls. It contends that the legacy of the “talking cure” obscures issues of responsible telling and listening, intergenerational respect, and silence in Māori and Hawaiian iterations of health and well-being. By reframing storytelling as a precarious, even dangerous, route to well-being, these readings demonstrate how Pacific literatures might contribute to culturally nuanced appraisals of oral rites and their relationship to colonial trauma.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma
• indigenous
• health
• storytelling
• Māori
• Hawaiian

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/L503848/1].

Notes on contributors

Emily Kate Timms

Emily Kate Timms is a PhD student in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. She is supervised by Dr Clare Barker and Prof. John McLeod and her work is sponsored by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities. Her thesis examines postcolonial representations of age and ageing in Aotearoa New Zealand and Caribbean fiction and film, and investigates how such representations can intervene in the discipline of gerontology and the newer field of ageing studies. She is the current editorial assistant for Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings and Stand Magazine.