The Adolescent Exotic: Reading New Zealand in David Hair’s “Aotearoa series” (2009–2014)

ABSTRACT

New Zealand adolescent fiction faces problems when it enters the global literary market, but not just predictable problems of uncertain comprehension when national borders are crossed. Cultural difference attracts the attention of the international reader, but raises anxieties about commodification of the text and its culture. David Hair’s “Aotearoa series” is anchored in a New Zealand past, largely revising history in line with Māori myths. In this modified fantasy, Aotearoa becomes an imaginary, secondary world to which the protagonist switches to discover something of himself, his Māori heritage, and the colonial enterprise in New Zealand. Hair’s novels display the glamour of their cultural difference, offering an international reader the lure of the foreign – an instance of the postcolonial exotic – which may improve their chances of selling in the overcrowded, global market for adolescent fiction, but perhaps at the cost of damaging, ideological confusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Aotearoa New Zealand
• commodification
• exoticism
• biculturalism
• magic realism
• David Hair

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Duder (2012): “While New Zealand needs stories with local content and local idiom to help its children become New Zealanders, local content may disadvantage the story when international sales are explored” (113).

2. Hans Christian Andersen Award, Carnegie Award (twice), Phoenix Award (three times), Horn Book Awards, ALA Best Book Citation for Young Adults, Observer Teenage Fiction Award, and a long list of New Zealand awards, including, eventually, two doctorates at New Zealand universities and the Prime Minister’s Award in Literary Fiction (Duder 2012, 351–352).

3. See Scoop Culture, March 25, 2010 (https://www.scoop.co.nz). The television series, the first dramatic drama series commissioned by Māori Television, won awards at a number of festivals and was a finalist at others – including the Kidscreen Awards in New York, 2011.

4. For Morris (2003), reviewing Whale Rider, “however universal” its appeal, it remained “a profoundly New Zealand film”. Niki Caro, the film’s Pākehā director (ambitious to be a “world-class” film-maker “with a vision”), has spoken of her drive to create a film that “reflect[s] a reality that one recognises for one’s country”, however “perverse”. See also Gauthier (2004, 67).

5. The film has grossed in excess of NZ$50,000,000. It also won Audience awards at Toronto, Sundance, and Rotterdam; Kezia Castle-Hughes, who played Paikea Apirana, was nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars and won the award for Best Young Actor/Actress at the Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards. For further discussion of Ihimaera’s revised text, see Heim, 2007.

6. For accounts of this fiction, see Mackenzie (1986), Green (1979), and Kutzer (2000); for angled accounts of writing on the Pacific, see Keown (2007, especially 35–37) and Edmond (1997, 145); for the New Zealand corner of this imperial venture, see Marquis (1999).

7. For Christopher Warnes (2009, 36–37), this kind of romance, rooted in medieval narrative, as a play of the known and the unknown, feeds eventually into magical realism.

8. Hair is prolific; while completing the “Aotearoa series”, he also wrote a similarly ghostly Indian quartet, another fantasy quartet, and a novel about World War I (also connected to New Zealand).

9. For discussion of the genre, see Valerie Krips (2000) and Tess Cosslett (2002). For Australasian instances, including one that focuses on a Māori past, see Marquis (2008).

10. Hair does not identify as Māori, but acknowledges the impact of his part-Māori grandmother’s local, Māori tales. See his dedication to the final novel: “This book is dedicated to Ngawhina Campbell, my late grandmother, for all the happy holidays in Rotorua, long walks and talks, tales of Hatupatu and Māui, swims at the Polynesian Pools and playing in Kuirau Park” (Hair 2014, 7).

11. In present-day New Zealand, of course, this fabulous adventure has been overtaken by historical fact, with the removal (April 2017) of the Treaty to the National Library.

12. For discussion of Māori Gothic in reading New Zealand literary and filmic texts, see Lawn (2006, 11–21) and Kavka (2014, 225–240); note also Mercer (2017). HarperCollins, in particular, have billed Hair as “the writer who defines the new genre of Maori Gothic”.

13. See also Faris (2004) on magical realism in its necessarily modern history; “[it] creates a new decolonized space for narrative, one not already occupied by the assumptions and techniques of European realism” (135). Faris argues that magic realism possesses five “primary” characteristics, including an “irreducible element” of magic and “descriptions [that] detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world” (7); both are markedly present in Hair’s “Aotearoa” novels.

14. Commentators on magic realism in children’s literature are not numerous. It is worth noting, however, an urge to assimilate this kind of reading to socialization; Rudge (2004) proposes that the opposition between realism and magic/fantasy “opens up a liminal space combining supposedly incompatible genres” where “emotionally challenging issues” can be addressed. (139) My impression is that the reader of Hair’s novels would have no time for any such discussion.

15. Pania herself tells Mat her tale: although one of the “sea people”, she fell in love with a local chief and lived with him on land, as his wife, but was eventually lured back to the sea by her own people; her love and death came to be bound up with the reef lying off the coast of Napier. Within the novel, she is an important early local informant for Mat, instructing him in tikanga, but also in dark corners of local colonial history, Parihaka, in particular (Hair 2010, 27–31).

16. Grey was the most influential of New Zealand’s early British governors, carrying out the role with considerable success; Hobson was the first governor (1841), following his drafting of the Treaty of Waitangi and securing general Māori agreement with its terms (1840). In Hair’s rewriting of history, Hobson has more presence than Grey, although Grey was clearly the more significant figure as both governor (twice, in 1846 and 1864) and premier (1877).

17. Richard Seddon (“King Dick”) was the dominant New Zealand prime minister of the late 19th century, in power from 1893 until 1906; Robert Muldoon was equally prominent but more controversial, as prime minister from 1975 until 1984.

18. Bryce prosecuted the campaign, as Native Affairs minister, and earned the soubriquet that haunts him in Hair’s world, “Bryce kohuru” (murderer).

19. The invasion on November 5, 1881, by about 1600 government troops, of the western Taranaki settlement of Parihaka, which had come to symbolize peaceful resistance to the confiscation of Māori land.

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Claudia Marquis

Claudia Marquis is a senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, teaching courses from early modern to postcolonial writing and adolescent fiction. She has published extensively on Caribbean literature and on adolescent fiction, especially the work of New Zealand writers. Recent research includes essays on Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee, and an article on teaching of New Zealand fiction for a volume of essays in the Modern Language Association of America pedagogical series, Options for Teaching. Her most recent publications are “ ‘Making a Spectacle of Yourself’: The Art of Anger in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2018), and “Colonialism and its Aftermath in The Lord of the Rings: Postcolonial Reflections on Tolkien’s Imperial Fantasy” in Aftermath: The Fall and Rise of the Event, edited by Robert Kusek et al. (Jagellonian University Press, 2020).