Deconstructing home: “The Return” in Pasifika writing of Aotearoa New Zealand

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Home and belonging
• The Return
• Pasifika writing
• Albert Wendt
• John Pule
• Sia Figiel
• Oscar Kightley and Simon Small

Aotearoa New Zealand as a South Pacific culture

This article focuses on literary constructions of home and belonging and changes in the thematic motif of the return to the island homeland appearing in the writing and other types of cultural production from Aotearoa New Zealand where the Pacific island community is the fastest growing of all the Pacific rim nations.¹ Always identifiable as a South Pacific culture through the Polynesian myths of migration, Aotearoa New Zealand’s pacific genealogy after the decolonization of its island territories (Tokelau, Niue and the Cook Islands) was renovated in the 1970s by the links that Maori Renaissance writers like Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera and Hone Tuwhare forged with their Polynesian heritage. The radical reinterpretation of place and home that first appears in Albert Wendt’s seminal novel Sons for the Return Home, published in 1973 when New Zealand’s multicultural, Pacific identity was just emerging, shows fertile intersections between pan-Polynesian cosmographies and colonial constructions of belonging. By the late 1980s, second- and third-generation Pasifika subjects from Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands and Niue began to deconstruct and rewrite territorial images of home and return in a variety of genres and media.² These latter define new mobile images of belonging that are developed outside the norms of nation and narration, creating a text-based articulation of diversity and creativity and helping define a pan-Pacific sense of belonging.

The changing constructions of the island homeland and reformulations of the return motif also correspond to changes in the concept of diaspora itself, from place-based to more mobile, deterritorialized models. Wendt’s novel and Sia Figiel’s (1996a) Where We Once Belonged can be read in relation to the myths of home and belonging of the Jewish and Armenian diasporas in which the return to the ancestral homeland is dominated by nostalgia and longing. Both reflect the expectations of the island remittance economy of payments and gifts from the diaspora, when the return to Samoa involved renewal of family ties, financial obligations and expectations of social leadership. Both highlight this moment as a contradictory and conflictual threshold experience for the young migrant for whom the demands of readjustment to the island society overwhelm those of living in diaspora.

Alternative models of diaspora and the return informed by new theories of place and space have dominated since the 1990s, and a new regionalism has emerged with transoceanic re-imaginings of the Pacific region as “Oceania” (Wendt 1976), and a “sea of islands” (Hauʻofa 2008), intersected and linked by patterns of migration and travel. These include concepts of trans/location in which space is read as affecting identity formation (Fresno-Calleja 2013, 205); in James Clifford’s (1992) “travelling chronotopes”, such as buses, airports, hotels, by which to interpret mobile intersections of travelling cultures (101); relocations of the diaspora experience in the hostland rather than the return, as suggested by Avtar Brah’s (1996) critique of fixed origins and her concepts of “living diasporically” and a “homing desire” as substitutes for the “desire for a homeland” (16, 180, 193). This shift towards a more deterritorialized belonging means that identity structures reorientate away from identification with place, nation and belonging into more mobile formations of selfhood and un/belonging.

The transitions in conceptualizing home and return in writing of the 1970s to the 1990s point to the changing patterns of migration during these decades. Islanders sought permanent employment opportunities in Pacific Rim nations, and after the diaspora communities of Aotearoa New Zealand expanded into second and third generations by the 1980s the reciprocal relations and extended family networking between host- and homelands began to diminish. Human resources have transferred more permanently to metropolitan centres, while the experience of new generations who have never seen their ancestral homeland means that returning citizens are more reluctant to invest in the island society than in the era of the remittance economy; indeed, identified as a threat to employment opportunities they are often not welcomed on a permanent basis (Connell 2002, 82). Although transnational links continue in the form of kinship relations and renewal of the linguistic, ethnic heritage, “returns” are either short-term visits, or due to lack of long-term employment in the diaspora, or nostalgic longing (Spoonley and Macpherson 2004, 181; Spoonley and Bedford 2012, 147–148).

This article identifies the growing fluidity of cultural transition in artistic representation as roots are realigned to routes, beginning with the cultural energies that emerged in the 1970s. Indigenous, mythological forms of expressions jostle against European genres, formats and languages in the new tangata Pasifika (Pacific culture) as Polynesian cultural forms are reconfigured with alignment towards western genres, and there is linguistic mixing of English with indigenous languages. Distinctive genres, modes and aesthetics emerge – oral storytelling, magic realism, Polynesian myths, fable and fairy tale, already accommodated into the Samoan form of fāgogo; these borrow from indigenous formats rather than western models of the colonial period as writers and artists seek to articulate a new, collective form of Pacific identity and belonging.

Deconstructing “The Return”: Albert Wendt, Sia Figiel, John Pule

My people no longer to me

Are the people of my childhood’s history

My Papa and Mama are no longer to me

The protectors of my life

My home no longer to me

My place of being

But a mere reference of my whole history.

(Winduo 1995, 249–250)

The Papua New Guinea poet, Stephen Edmund Winduo, who attended school and university in Aotearoa New Zealand, illustrates here the reconfiguration of “home” through recognizing different types of attachment. The prior claims on identity of kinship and place are loosened to become “a mere reference in my whole history” as Winduo constructs a version of selfhood that encompasses more diversely located, temporally inflected notions of belonging. The following discussion of three texts – forms of the Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel – shows variations on this kind of self-repositioning in the reinvention of a Pacific diasporic imaginary, based around ideas of home, un/belonging, departures and return.

Albert Wendt, Sons for the Return Home (1973)

Albert Wendt’s first novel was published at a time when Maori writing by Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme and Hone Tuwhare was beginning to make an impact in New Zealand, and it instantly established Wendt as the leading voice in the Pacific Island struggle for recognition and literary decolonization. Set in the 1950s and 1960s, when there was little understanding of cultural and ethnic diversity, it presents a sharply critical image of New Zealand’s social and racial divisions. Defined as a classic diaspora text (Keown 2007, 192), it adapts the form of the Bildungsroman to the themes of an ill-fated, mixed-race love affair (about which Patricia Grace [1978] would write in Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps), racial discrimination and the crisis of return to the homeland in Samoa.

Wendt wrote the novel around 1965, having returned to Samoa from New Zealand to promote South Pacific literature (Sharrad 2003, 42). Like Stephen Winduo, he studied as a scholarship student from 1953, going back to Samoa every three years. He returned permanently to New Zealand to teach at the University of Auckland in 1988. This pattern of back-and-forth migration has led to his self-definition as a “mongrel” living in “exile as a permanent condition of life” (48), and the novel amounts to an exploration in semi-autobiographical terms of how to transpose this sense of rootlessness into an artistic world view, enabling him to find a home in his work. Wendt turned to Camus and European existentialism to resolve the conflict in Sons for the Return Home, with a process of disavowal and disassociation from family and emotional ties and, as Sharrad (2003) points out, through the development of integrative symbols in his art, notably the culturally specific Polynesian myth of Maui, as one that speaks of the universality of human experience (45, 53).

Sons for the Return Home traces the lives of a Samoan family who migrate to New Zealand for economic and educational reasons, and it focuses on the son who falls in love with a pelagi (white) woman at university; the to and fro implied by the “return” of the novel’s title is also embodied in a narrative structure that Wendt has described as discontinuous – consisting of short sections of prose so that each chapter can be read as self-contained. Narrative continuity emerges from the unnamed protagonist’s search for autonomy and voice by transgressing national, sociopolitical boundaries (Sharrad 2003, 42–43).

The novel reflects the contrapuntal consciousness of the Samoan student educated overseas who has developed a cross-cultural world view, although its male subjectivity reflects a patriarchal social structure. The limits imposed by an alien society are registered by the father who felt “trapped in the belly of a huge metallic fish”, working in a factory where he did not understand the language (Wendt 1973, 53), and the son, who finds that in the urban environment man “bleeds himself of all his rich warm fertile humanity and goodness” (192). The mother, by contrast, sees the return to Samoa as a chance to exert social influence and exhibit the family’s affluence; she takes refuge in illusion and nostalgia for the island culture, dismissing New Zealand as a “pagan country” and dreaming of “the fabulous new Samoa to be attained by her sons when they returned home” (76).

Wendt’s critique of the traditional expectations of the return emerges first through the son’s unpreparedness for the flies, mosquitoes, lack of sanitation, malnutrition, all contributing to his disillusionment with his parents’ dream of a triumphant arrival, which he realizes is based on fantasies and TV images. But his self-alienation, seeing himself as among “mythical characters of the legends that his parents had nourished him on for years” (Wendt 1973, 172), implies the need for a new myth of exile and return. This begins in the uncovering of a family secret that points to a genealogical flaw: his grandfather had murdered his grandmother when he forced her to have an abortion. Wendt draws on the same trope of murder and betrayal within kinship relations that New Zealand writer Janet Frame ([1951] 1961) uses in her early story “The Lagoon” in which it is revealed to the narrator that her great grandmother “drowned her husband, pushed him into the lagoon” (10). Wendt’s protagonist adopts this theme of flawed beginnings and false myths of origin and belonging, familiar throughout European literature, to anticipate his break from the past and the new beginning that underpins his departure from Samoa.³ The revelation of this prior rupture within marital and kinship relations provides a genealogical parallel to his girlfriend’s abortion, undertaken without his knowledge and spelling out the end of their relationship. It also leads to the more complex personal symbolism around the theme of his mortality and life’s fragility by which he escapes from the shackles of expectation into a new sense of time: “He had nothing to regret; nothing to look forward to. All was well. He was alive; at a new beginning. He was free of his dead” (Wendt 1973, 217).

This moment of liberation as he distances himself from his ancestry and parents, disowning his mother, saying “She is not my mother any more” (Wendt 1973, 215), anticipates the novel’s concluding image of the pan-Polynesian trickster god Maui, who loses his life in seeking immortality by entering the vagina of the death goddess, Hine-nui-te-po. The son identifies with this gesture in mid-flight to Aotearoa New Zealand; he exorcizes memories of the girl he has loved by tearing up the poems he had written to her, and links his aspirations to be a writer to taking his chances with fate, imaged as the Polynesian goddess, in an inversion of the novel’s gender hierarchy:

He took out his pen and on the cover of the slick Technicolour tourist brochure [ ... ] he wrote in large letters. And Hine-nui-te-Po woke up and found him in there. And she crossed her legs and thus ended mans’ quest for immortality. He imagined Maui to have been happy in his death. (Wendt 1973, 217; original emphasis)

The recalibration of mythic with contemporary temporalities, and of distance with place in this moment mid-flight, emphasizes that “the middle state can become a homeland” (Ellis 1998); that is, one of those in-between spaces that straddle the binaries of place, nation and gender, a site for “strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity” (Bhabha 2004, 1). In generating cross-cultural fertilization, the middle state has creative potential: Wendt’s protagonist reconfigures his identity for, as Bill Ashcroft (1981) points out, he can replace any particular place such as the site of ancestral memory with “the place where he is” (28; cited by Sharrad 2003, 53; original emphasis).

Home and return are therefore diametrically opposed in the novel’s ending: the “home” that the protagonist returns to in Samoa is no more a place of belonging than Aotearoa New Zealand. The equation between the terms implied by the title Sons for the Return Home is pulled apart, and Wendt leaves existentially wide open the question of where home is, or whether a single homeland can provide belonging. Key to this decolonizing moment is the narrator’s recognition that the weight of tradition can be challenged. His comment, “He was free of his dead”, suggests that in casting off the ancestral past he frees himself for access to the precolonial Polynesian cultural heritage.

Sharrad argues that the protagonist’s acquisition of self-possession by confronting his own mortality through using Polynesian Maori culture and appropriating the Maui story to the Samoan context constitutes the “unique expression of a modern Pacific intellectual’s world view”, but I suggest that this “crowning achievement” (Sharrad 2003, 51) also depends on the intertwining of Polynesian myth with the European legend of a flawed heritage. The motif of murder that interrupts and undermines social norms is deployed in New Zealand writing not only by Janet Frame, but also by Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson as a key indicator of a developing national consciousness. Wendt’s major contribution in Sons for the Return Home, one that marks the tradition’s cultural and ethnic diversification and reconfiguration, is to the literary trope of the return, which he reroutes from rooted locations, including family and kinship attachments, into a more mobile, dynamic one, better suited to a multicultural society. This double move can be read through the cyclical logic of tidealectics in terms of the ending’s new “intersections between space and time, place and history” (Deloughrey 2007, 2) as he incorporates Polynesian mythology and European myths into an existential vision of displacement as based on placelessness and “constitutive of cultural meaning” (47).

Sia Figiel, Where We Once Belonged (1996a)

Sharrad (2003, 54) argues that in Sons for the Return Home Wendt generates an aesthetic model with mythic symbols of modern metaphysics that offers a springboard to writers who wish to move from an oral to a written culture. A similar combination of storytelling modes that synthesize European and Polynesian myths, literary motifs and narrative paradigms shapes the aesthetics of Where We Once Belonged, the debut novel of performance poet and writer Sia Figiel. Figiel’s orally based story, like her novella, The Girl in the Moon Circle (Figiel 1996b), is based on a traditional Samoan song form called su’ifefiloi (weaving or threading of songs) which strings together individual stories interspersed with poems like flowers on a lei (garland) (Keown 2017, 493–494; Gin 2018). This circular, episodic structure suggests the state of disorientation behind the teenage voices in the narrative.

In this coming-of-age story, Samoan society and its families are the narrative fulcrum, and remittances, gifts and return visits to the island made by family members from the diaspora are eagerly welcomed. Figiel engages in a gendered dialogue with Sons for the Return Home in telling of the return from New Zealand of a female scholar who, like Wendt’s protagonist, has two academic degrees, but unlike him is alienated and cast out from her village. Her portrait challenges the rule-bound morality of Samoan society and the conventional success story, when this account of internal exile opens up for the narrator the possibility of artistic growth and autonomy.

Figiel also attacks western myths of Samoa as an exotic Pacific paradise and site of excessive sexuality, promoted by colonial and anthropological accounts which showed women in a compromising light. Colonial visitors to the Pacific like Paul Gauguin, Robert Louis Stevenson and the anthropologist Margaret Mead are associated with these romantic stereotypes. The focus of the novel, however, is on the exposure of the island’s “sexual double standard” (Keown 2017, 491) through revelations of the licentiousness of adults yet the harsh codes of punishment levied at young girls for sexual misdemeanours which the men may have perpetrated. Both this novel and its successor, They Who Do Not Grieve (Figiel 1999), are ripostes to Mead’s portrait in Coming of Age in Samoa, of a patriarchal society with sexually permissive women who “love ‘it’ and do ‘it’ a lot” (Figiel 1996a, 204).

The terms “where” and “once” of the novel’s title imply that belonging is a romantic notion attached to a past world propped up by a falsifying essentialist value system of kinship, religion and community. That a departure from family and cultural expectations has already occurred, involving some rupture of the homogeneity of island life, is suggested by the positioning of the female presence as unruly, rebellious and challenging. Figiel writes through the voice of a 13-year-old girl, Alofa Filiga, and her friends in the village of Malaefou as their discovery of sex and its disruptive powers brings them into collision with the community’s outwardly strict moral code of conduct. Witnessing the hypocrisies and deceptions of their elders leaves them shocked and betrayed yet powerless to resist this regulatory regime.

But the crowning revelation of this patriarchal society is not the savage beatings and public humiliations that Alofa and her friends suffer for their misdeeds, but the fate of the returnee from New Zealand whose radical challenge to the Samoan way of life, her vision of the villagers as living in darkness and ignorance, exceeds the schoolgirls’ fears and terrors. Siniva is the first girl from Malaefou to go to New Zealand on a government scholarship, but upon her return in 1972 she denounces western Enlightenment values, destroys her degree certificates, preaching an antithetical faith that casts her as crazy. She has been reincarnated, Jesus Christ was not Samoan, nuns and pastors have killed Tagaloa’algai (the supreme creator), because colonization has destroyed traditional Samoan beliefs. Beaten up by her brother and father and diagnosed by her mother with “ma’i aiku – ghost sickness” (Figiel 1996a, 186), Siniva becomes aimless, her life meaningless: “She would sit under the clock in Apia and smoke banana leaves and wave at Palagis. ‘Go back to where you came from you fucking ghosts! Gauguin is dead. There is no Paradise!’ ” (187).

As in Wendt’s novel the revelation of a family secret – that is, her kinship with the abject Siniva – enables Alofa to distance herself from her environment and discover herself as an individual. Upon finding that the mad, blind woman is in fact her aunt, her father’s sister, Alofa, during an experience of spiritual death, reinvents her as a woman warrior with access to precolonial mythologies, legends and war gods, similar to the female warrior Nafanua, with whom she also identifies, who leads the people to war; she is inspired by Siniva’s mission to “re-evaluate, redefine, remember … if we dare” the world known as “Lightness” that died in 1830 (Figiel 1996a, 233). When Siniva commits suicide and is unmourned, forgotten instantly by the villagers, Alofa finds her aunt's belief in their damnation opens up a choice: “For this is darkness. Everyone is living in Darkness and they don’t see it” (233; original emphasis). Siniva's physical blindness symbolizes her vision of the “enlightened” precolonial world by contrast to the “blinding” materialism, religion and modern values of the villagers of Falaefou.

This tragic story of homecoming in which the outcast who rejects her western education loses any sense of belonging contrasts to the return of Wendt’s hero who is celebrated as “the best son of the village and of Samoa” (Wendt 1973, 182), inspiring the hotel receptionist where he is staying to fall in love with him. But there are significant parallels. Both refuse to reassimilate, and, like Wendt’s protagonist who turns to the Polynesian myth of Maui to acquire self-possession and embrace his destiny, Figiel’s narrator learns from her aunt’s death how to revalue and recuperate indigenous myths and so to define her difference.⁴ This moment of self-discovery as Alofa identifies with Siniva’s thoughts prompts her separation from the village collective: “I am alone. I am ‘I’ in its totality ‘I’ without ‘we’ … without Moa, Ili, girls, boys … . I am.” Coming to this point enables her to speak from the position of a “new gathering place” (236) as she relegates to the past the old, collective way of belonging. The radical reversals of her aunt’s “return”, her unbelonging and unbecoming in death, flow through the narrative, interacting with Aloha’s emerging consciousness as a conduit to self-agency in ways that match the new autonomy of Wendt’s hero at the end of his novel.

John Puhiatau Pule, The Shark that Ate the Sun: Ko e Mapo ne Kai e La (1992)

John Pule’s debut novel concerns an extended Niuean Island family living among a large Polynesian diaspora community in South Auckland to where they migrated in 1964. Written as a coming-of-age story from the viewpoint of a young boy, Fisi, and extending to Niue in an earlier period through letters, stories and poems, the novel explores the responses of two generations to migration from “the Rock”, as Niue, an uplifted coral atoll between Tonga and Samoa, is called. Through the story of Fisi’s father, Puhia, it poses the problem of dealing with departure, return and the renewal of “homeland belonging” when this is physically out of reach. For members of the Niue diaspora in the 1960s and 1970s, to go back spells failure or death, yet the island where they come from, and their Pacific identity as shaped by that island experience, influence their life in diaspora in ways they can neither understand or resolve. Fisi’s own story reflects and intersects with this problematic heritage, indirectly providing images that compensate for the loss of home and belonging by artistically invoking the rootedness that his father and his generation lack in Aotearoa New Zealand. Like Wendt’s and Figiel’s narratives it culminates in Fisi’s finding a mode of artistic expression by which to give voice to the domestic turbulence of his childhood and love for his Pacific heritage.

Paloma Fresno-Calleja has examined this story in terms of the spatial framework of trans/location which “suggests a fluidity – between past and present, the small island and the big city – which acknowledges and engages critically with the complex and ambivalent dimensions of the diasporic condition” (2013, 204), in narratives of islanders who come to settle and make a home in New Zealand. “Trans/locating” refers to the family’s displacements in South Auckland as they move from one Polynesian enclave to another – Karangahape Rd, Ponsonby Rd, Grey Lynn, and the southern Auckland suburbs of Otara and Otahou (where at least 25 percent of residents are Pacific [204]) – and which are counterbalanced by communal activities such as churchgoing and dancing that involve other Pacific communities. These locales, Fresno-Calleja points out, effectively constitute tightly knit village groupings rather than extended communities, enabling the younger family members to experience “multiple attachments” and by “transcending the spatial limits imposed on them” (208) to find a place within society. But the concept of trans/location does not work so well for the older generation which lacks the social fluidity and cultural diversity of the younger, as Puhia and others are entrenched in a negative pattern of working and drinking reinforced by their distance from and reduced contact with their island world.

Like Wendt, Pule critiques the subtle forms of racial discrimination in Aotearoa New Zealand at that time due to a laissez faire attitude towards recently arrived migrants who provided cheap labour with little attempt to integrate them into white society. Fisi’s family feel that along with other Polynesians they were deliberately marginalised, cut off because

[i]t was the policy of the time to push the labourers, low income earners, back, back to the south, back south where land is cleared of bush, farmhouses, and in its place houses, block houses, cheap ugly. So there we were Polynesian, outcasts, living in a state house, with others like ourselves. (Pule 1992, 183).

This raises the question of the Niue Islanders’ position in New Zealand society, and how racism is enmeshed with issues of class and socio-economic status. Along with Cook Islanders and Tokelauans, Niueans are considered officially part of the state in New Zealand, can enjoy free movement back and forth and are entitled to the same rights as other citizens (Powles 2006, 52–53). The family’s ongoing domestic violence and dysfunction which affects the children is usually handled by relatives and other Pacific community members, but after Fisi goes to jail he becomes a social welfare problem. Significantly, however, it is an Englishman, Fisi’s supervisor at the goods store in the Otahuhu railway station, who observes him sketching and urges him not to continue with manual labouring jobs (Pule 1992, 288).

The novel focuses first on Fisi’s father, Puhia, whose radical dislocation and maladjustment in New Zealand can be traced to his first migration in 1944 when he was shipped back due to his inability to handle alcohol; he returned a second time in 1964 with a new family including Fisi aged two. The mental challenge of modernization transforms his cosmology, confronting him with his mortality:

Living in New Zealand there is a new horizon that is more powerful than the word death, look at my house magic light spits from the ceiling at the turn of a switch my own little sun in my own square box. (Pule 1992, 56)

Pule’s textual construction of a conflict between dispossession and dislocation from the island, and liberation into the promise of modernity, hinges on the father’s inability to adjust to the new demands of living diasporically. A manual worker, Puhia associates with other Polynesian labourers who seemingly live only for their own company and that of their women at the end of each day in the Family and Naval or the Rising Sun pubs on “Karangaphape Road, little Polynesian street” (55), or the Three Lamps in Ponsonby Road. Yet these venues, from where they are often removed in police cars at evening’s end, are havens for the capture of memories of the land they cannot return to as they become animated by retellings of stories, legends and folk tales. The mixture of memories and stories that intersperses the flow of family life takes more formal shape in The Shark that Ate the Sun; its tryptic-like structure includes intercalated sequences of poems and legends.

The family’s emigration is just one legacy of the colonization of Niue, which was annexed by New Zealand in 1901 and became self-governing in 1974. In conditions of remoteness and subsistence living, colonization imposed a level of religious and moral rigidity which crippled the people’s spirit, reducing their life force, by repressing them as a Third World culture. Its harshness is reflected in the murder in 1953 of the New Zealand Commissioner who jailed Niueans for drinking, gambling, adultery and holding hands in public; one of three men who committed this crime (all escaped prisoners), believing they were ridding themselves of a tyrant, appears in Auckland as a friend of Puhia (Pule 1992, 125–126, 200; Hindmarsh 2018). By 1984 over 40 percent of the island’s population had emigrated to New Zealand.

To Puhia and others of his generation who leave the island, therefore, Niue means nothing as a place to live but is everything as “home” in terms of an island culture with its myths and legends. Aotearoa New Zealand is some kind of Nirvana, but being “far away from home” breeds futility and monstrosity. Puhia becomes “sick of life, what it did to him bringing him all the way here to this spot, on this vast land, to be housed in a box” (Pule 1992, 200). Violence, abuse and domestic chaos are his life’s litany as along with others he drinks to oblivion: to “forget Niue, forget home, forget the dusty roads, forget the plantation, the melon fields, the coconuts, the crabs, the fish and the church [ ... ], that sucks money from the poor, forget everything from the past” (56).

It can be argued that the Niuean migrant pathology in the novel, one that goes further than cultural displacement, invokes the condition of the refugee, not because the immigrants are fleeing persecution or seeking asylum, but because living conditions in Niue have not fitted them for the modern world. A definition of the refugee by individualist standards, preceding that of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees which is based on fear of persecution, says the refugee is

in search of an escape from perceived injustice or fundamental incompatibility with her home state. She distrusts the authorities who have rendered continued residence in her country of origin either impossible or intolerable, and desires the opportunity to build a new life abroad. (Chimni 2000, 12)

Niue Islanders in the Aotearoa New Zealand diaspora are escapees from a limited island society which offered few opportunities for younger generations, and where modernity was shunned. Puhia’s friend from Niue claims that just the old ways are worth going back for, whereas Fisi sees nothing but “boredom and poverty” in looking back (Pule 1992, 126, 249).

The subliminal ties to the island and deep attachment to the land and sea pull the men back in memory, like the father in Sons for the Return Home who wanted to return to Samoa when in New Zealand to continue farming. They underlie the mysterious illness that one of Puhia’s friends succumbs to, who is sent “back home to the village where he was born, to the darkness which breeds legends and superstition. He died in the village not long after he arrived. Goodbye” (Pule 1992, 238). Such a subliminal attachment to place can be described in terms of Kristeva’s (1982) semiotic, the prenatal pre-linguistic communication that exists between mother and child; the realm of the symbolic the law of the father – of acquired societal behaviour, communicable language and the unwritten codes of power operating in any society – is represented by the hostland of New Zealand where their plight is incomprehensible and untreatable (2).

For Puhia who crossed “the line of forgetfulness” (Pule 1992, 77) in the distant horizon by migrating, the island experience returns to haunt him; walking drunkenly along Karangahape Road he thinks “my life is so far away” (136). Fisi, however, identifies migrancy as a form of truancy and manages to shape the anarchy of movement that his father found so disorientating into an aesthetic dimension in art. This can be seen both in Pule’s writing and in his paintings which fuse the real and legendary into the same space, blending representational with abstract images, the traditional with the private, showing a fractured chronology, slippages in narrative viewpoint, and exotic symbolism: as exemplified in the novel’s surrealistic opening:

The year robs the soul’s river and leaves fat creatures with old eyes wearing sunglasses. I see a mountain overpopulated with the working class, the outcast, the drunkards, the black, the poor, the Polynesian, the white.

The blue sky has that melancholic countenance of islanders when their eyes become telluric wastes, instrumental sounds of countries destroyed. (Pule 1992, 9–10)

The island homeland is more elusive of any settled meaning than the conflict over nostalgic and dismissive representations of Samoa in the writings of Wendt and Figiel, reflecting its physical inaccessibility for those who have left. Niue as home or place of belonging emerges through Fisi’s guitar-playing, conjuring up “love” and “an air of faith and truth” (236) in Puhia’s melancholic memories. In the novel such meanings also emerge textually through retellings of stories, poems and legends, and these multiple dimensions of home anticipate the representations of the second- and third-generation diasporans.

From return to arrival: Oscar Kightley and Simon Small, Fresh off the Boat (2005)

I AM – A Samoan … but not a Samoan

To my ’aiga [extended family] in Samoa … I am a “Palagi” [white European]

I AM – A New Zealander … but not a New Zealander

To New Zealanders … I am a “bloody coconut,” at worst,

Or a “Pacific Islander,” at best

I am – to my Samoan parents … their child.

(Anae 2002, 150)

Melani Anae’s poem lists the conflicting labels and stereotypes that suggest points of confluence for the New Zealand-born Pacific islander who has a foot in both cultures. Her narrator’s crisis of belonging caused by competing definitions of ethnicity and nationality contrasts to the new self-positioning in the poem by Steve Winduo, made by resituating place and kinship identifications. The tangata Pasifika identity shown in this poem began developing in the late 1980s when the numbers of Pacific peoples born in Aotearoa New Zealand equalled those who had migrated from their homelands, and exceeded those in smaller origin societies like Niue and Tokelau (Spoonley and Macpherson 2004, 180). New hybrid identities with distinctive cultural characteristics associated with the host society began to provide a highly localized presence, particularly in Auckland, now the largest Pacific city in the world (Fresno-Calleja 2013, 211).

With “Niu Sila” as the new home for the cultural production that emerged in the 1980s, the earlier to-and-fro pattern of movement and settlement is reconfigured in ways that illustrate Avtar Brah’s notion of “diaspora space”, one in which the breaking down of ethnic barriers encourages “a collective imagining to be inscribed through the intersections of many diasporas” (1996, 208). There is greater variation of Polynesian ethnic identity in the shared lifestyles, customs and values of Pacific diaspora communities due to inter-ethnic affiliations through intermarriage (e.g. between Tongan and Samoan, Samoan and Maori). Through the digital and web-based technologies of global diasporas, such as TV channels and radio stations, that facilitate the local growth of the new media outside the mainstream, the new Pacific communities have acquired more control over their own images. This includes reproducing stereotypes that reflect a renegotiation of their origins and a restructuring of racial and ethnic differences.

The migrant experience represented in visual or oral genres that utilize media stereotypes redeployed for comic effect is the base of a vibrant multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, illustrative of Bruce Ackerman’s “rooted cosmopolitanism” (1994, 516–535), being founded on concrete relationships, cultural networks, and respect for gendered and ethnic differences (Appiah 1997, 617–639). Groups like the Pacific Theatre, the Pacific Underground and the comic troupe “The Naked Samoans”, and in the 1990s the comic TV series Skitz and in 2004 Bro’town (Keown  2007, 213), all draw on indigenous motifs of the oral comedy sketch, notably the Samoan fale aitu (house of spirits) which is performed using different personae. There are collaborations between Maori, Samoans and other ethnic groups, and a dependence on communal understanding of local, oral jokes and insights traceable to the folk humour of Samoan culture and a subversive attitude to political authority. This irreverence was partly anticipated by the populist, cinematic elements of Wendt’s early work.

In the exuberant, stylized satires of place and belonging, the trope of the return takes on a new prominence when counterpointed by the revitalized concept of the arrival as viewed by those born in Niu Sila, “this place we now call home”, for whom the original homeland is a myth not a memory. The popularity of Oscar Kightley and Simon Small’s play Fresh off the Boat, first performed in 1993, and showcasing the professional Polynesian theatre company the Pacific Underground (Warrington and O’Donnell 2017, 86–87), comes from this comic reversal of the return – the encounter in the first moments of arrival. An easy target of satire, expressed through punning and innuendo strategies of the fale aitu (comic theatre) tradition, this trope is recast in line with the entertainment expectations of the locally grown Pasifika tangata.

By contrast to the nuclear family of Wendt’s novel there is a widened domestic ethnic and social base: a Samoan single mother with her New Zealand-born daughters, her white boyfriend, and another New Zealand-born Samoan of her daughters’ age called Samoa. “Fresh off the boat” or “fob” is a well-known epithet used of the new arrival among others such as “freshies” or “coconuts” (Fresno-Calleja 2013, 207), and the comedy turns not just on the generational and cultural gaps, misconceptions and misunderstandings that occur when the family’s uncle, Charles, arrives from Samoa, but also on the assumptions of the audience. Not surprisingly some of the jokes had worn thin by the time the play was published in 2005 (Warrington and O’Donnell 2017, 87). Familiar stereotypes are satirically reproduced: New Zealand is an Edenic land of milk and honey, migration is a form of liberation, new arrivals spend all their money in the pub, migrants live in a ghetto, and Samoans are a homogenous group. Uncle Charles’s announcement, “We are all Samoan”, when accused of trying to change the family’s lifestyle back to a Samoan one, exposes his ignorance of the multi-ethnic identities of the New Zealand-born (Kightley and Small 2005, 63). Fresh off the Boat introduces Polynesian voices, language and culture though linguistic mixing; in the play’s reversals the physical return to the island homeland is outside the frame, but becomes a possibility for the second-generation Samoans when newly arrived Uncle Charles, representing Samoa’s cultural specificity, explodes their assumptions about this place of ancestral belonging.

The shift towards the popular culture of the Pasifika generations in Aotearoa New Zealand which uses parody, satire, linguistic borrowing and visual innovation is comparable to Asian British culture of the same era as found in the popular TV series by Meera Syal: The Kumars at No. 42 (2001–06), and Goodness Gracious Me (1998–2001), and films like Bend it Like Beckham (2002) and East is East (1999), whose comedy comes from a knowing awareness of cultural differences. The hybrid, episodic narratives of Sons for the Return Home, Where We Once Belonged and The Shark that Ate the Sun tend to disappear in the later versions of Pasifika diaspora culture, apart from some film scripts such as No 2 (2006), an adaptation of a play by Fijian writer Toa Fraser, and Sione’s Wedding (2006), co-scripted by Oscar Kightley. In general other aesthetic modes – discontinuous narrative, juxtaposition – take over in the collective collaborations between multiple ethnic minorities: Maori, Chinese, Samoans, Niueans, Tongans and Fijians. Providing a cultural presence that refuses to bow to assimilation but instead marks up identity distinctiveness and difference, the second and third generations are more articulate about their cultural hybridity and their place in the nation’s imaginary, less concerned with home and belonging than the first – confirming the diaspora experience elsewhere. To reinvoke the new regionalism of the Pacific region with which this article begins, the end of this phase of migration shows that transnational movement has energized a cultural fluidity, anchored to a new land, and emanating from a multicultural base.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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.

Notes

1. It now consists of 6.9 percent of a population of over 4 million (Fresno-Calleja 2013, 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 2004, 143; Fresno-Calleja 2013, 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 [1925] 1967, 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 1998, 53).