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ABSTRACT
This article examines changing representations of home and belonging in Pasifika writing from Aotearoa New Zealand from the 1970s to the 1990s. Although the circular pattern of movement between islands and to and from the Pacific rim centres continues, the increase in migration and growth of diaspora communities has led to the loosening of ties to the island homeland. Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home (1975), Sia Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged (1996) and John Pule’s The Shark that Ate the Sun (1992) subvert western essentialized notions of the return motif with rewritings of home that invoke a sense of unbelonging. In the culturally hybrid production of New Zealand-born Pacific Islanders, these deconstructions are taken further: in Oscar Kightley and Simon Small’s play Fresh off the Boat (2005) the return is displaced by the concept of arrival, while the island homeland becomes partial and provisional, constructed from a distance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. It now consists of 6.9 percent of a population of over 4 million (Fresno-Calleja Citation2013, 204).
2. To New Zealand-born Pacific Islanders new ethnic identities reflect more extended networks of belonging: e.g. “PI’s”, “Polys”, “tangata Pasifka”, “Pasifikans”, “NZ borns”, “Fa’a Niu Sila”, “Fa’a Auckland” (substitutes for the label “fa’a Samoan” – the Samoan way) (Macpherson Citation2004, 143; Fresno-Calleja Citation2013, 211).
3. The 14th-century Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, opens with the flawed genealogy of the West, embodied in Aeneas, who after the Siege of Troy was dishonoured as a traitor, but founded provinces and ruled over all the western isles (Anon [Citation1925] Citation1967, 1, lines 1-7).
4. Siniva’s fate corresponds to the clash of expectations between the fa’asamoa (Samoan way, the collectivity) and western ways, found by many Samoan girls, brought up according to strict moral codes. One says: “It wasn’t til I moved away from my home environment that I realised I had no self identity. [ ... ] I really felt I was going crazy” (Tupoloa Citation1998, 53).
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Notes on contributors
Janet M. Wilson
Janet M. Wilson is professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. She has published widely on the postcolonial/diaspora writing of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, including the writings of Katherine Mansfield. A recent publication is the co-edited Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader (2017). She is the co-editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and vice-chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society.