Potiki

Patricia Grace’s novel Potiki introduces a fascinating perspective on homelands that we have not yet seen in this course. The novel also offers different takes on aspects of homelands that we have examined in previous weeks. One theme that becomes very apparent throughout the story is the importance of time to the Maori culture, and how their understanding of time differs from a traditional linear conceptualization of time. This difference in understanding is clearly evident in a discussion that takes place between Mr. Dolman and the members of the village that comes under threat from developers. Mr. Dolman perceives the villagers as being resentful for events that occurred in the past between the Maori and Europeans, even when they claim that they are worried about the present. “Blaming is a worthless exercise,” they state, because “[t]hat would really be looking back. It’s now we’re interested in. Now and from now on.” Mr. Dolman is perplexed, as he wonders, “[w]hy the concern with what’s gone? It’s all done with.” “What we value doesn’t change just because we look at ourselves and at the future,” they reply. “What we came from doesn’t change. It’s your jumping-off place that tells you where you’ll land. The past is the future” (Grace 94).  This exchange epitomizes the clash of culture that occurs in the novel. Mr. Dolman and the villagers experience great trouble when trying to communicate with each other, largely because Mr. Dolman and his “Dollarmen” lack a basic understanding of essential components of Maori culture such as their apprehension of time. For the Maori, where they come from and where they are going all contribute to their place in the world at the present. While Mr. Dolman’s grasps time as progressing linearly, from before, to during, to after, the Maori comprehend time as much more interconnected, with their pasts and their futures all contributing to the exact moment in time that they are experiencing right now. This concept also contributes to how the Maori define themselves. Their ancestry is very much a part of who they are, and is not just a memory in the past. For example, as Mary shows Toko the gathering house early in the novel and points out specific carvings throughout the building, she is able to point out both herself and Toko in the woodwork, and even caresses the wooden man as if he is her husband. Mary’s actions and words show how they believe that their ancestry continues on within them, and not only contributes to who they, but actually makes up who they are. This reinforces their belief that the past, present, and future are essentially synonymous. Grace sheds a great deal of light into Maori culture in her novel, and perhaps no aspect of their culture is more interesting than their understanding of time and its relationship to them all.

The Importance of Symbols

Symbols within a culture become especially important when that culture is forced to adapt to a new culture. For the Maori people, “Dollarmen” or industry from other countries come in and essentially take over their land. When the stench of factory stacks and greedy businesses take over the land the local culture and the ties to the land become less and less significant. Holding on to cultural symbols is one of the few ways to keep a culture around. Patricia Grace discusses through the many different short stories the unique symbols in Maori culture that even still today remain.

One significant symbol to the Maori people is the wharenui which is a kind of meeting house for the people and remains an important place where rituals take place. The building serves as an important building, not necessarily sacred, to the Maori. It is considered to be a central place for their community which is important especially when their land is threatened to be essentially overtaken by businesses and industry.

The language in Grace’s novel serves as another kind of symbol. For me, who has no experience with this culture, I felt somewhat connected to the character’s stories because children have a fresh perspective on everything. The way many of these characters look at the world is how I to am experiencing their world. A brand new, never- been- tainted-before lens of the Maori culture. Through the children’s and their relative’s perspective of the culture I am able to understand it. Especially the way Grace incorporates the language which teaches people not experienced with the culture how Maori people interact with one another.

Although only a few significant symbols like the community center and the language itself are presented in my blog post, there are many more in the novel. Grace used the symbols in a creative way which made me feel connected to the characters in a different way than I’ve experienced in other texts. 

The Prologue to Potiki as a Cultural Crash Course

The story of the master carver at the beginning of Potiki seems, upon the first reading, to be largely unrelated to the story as a whole. Besides the connection between the Tamihana family’s home and the final wood carving of the master, this story hardly ties in with the rest of the novel. And yet, Patricia Grace introduces us to this man before anyone else in the story, and so grants him a particular weight in the story that lies outside the plot itself. First of all, this prologue serves as an interesting introduction to Maori culture. Without some basic explanation of the culture, this novel would be incomprehensible, and Patricia Grace effectively conveys the people’s way of thinking in this chapter. For instance, stories play an important role in the traditions of the people and in the theme of the novel, and so Grace opens with a story steeped in tradition. We see the importance of community, as the carver is important because “when the carver dies, he leaves behind him a house for the people… he has given the people himself, and he has given the people his ancestors and their own” (8). His legacy is his contribution to others, and he is remembered for his service to the community. We also see hints of the ancestral nature of the culture, and the emphasis placed on family and home. A respect for nature is also conveyed in this prologue, as it is explained that “the man is [not] master of the tree… He is master only of the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb that is a tree” (7). The tree is treated with something akin to reverence, and human effort or skill is not praised as much as the latent potential of the tree. This idea of men having no right to command or control nature becomes central to the novel as the Dollarmen try to claim the land for themselves. Finally, we are given the story of the master carver’s final work, which serves as an introduction to the culture represented by the novel. As he describes it, he presents the image of an almost grotesque figure, with a large head, a long tongue, a hunched back, short arms, and extra fingers. And yet, all of these features are meaningful – they represent skills and gifts. The figure he carves resembles Toko in its deformity, but also in its value. The Dollarmen look down on Toko because of his disability, but his family loves and embraces him, as does his community. They see his intelligence and his compassion, and they value him for the skills that he does possess rather than pitying him for what he lacks. The Maori homeland is accepting and embraces all of nature, even its apparent ugliness. They do not place anyone above or below everyone else – they are all in charge, and live in a beautiful, respectful harmony which is both unfamiliar and refreshing to one who is accustomed to Western views. 

Cross Roads

     Is the homeland always lost? If you’re living in it, it’s not so much of a homeland so much as it is your land. It only takes the prefix home once you’ve visited another land––or until there comes a change to the land you’d called home. A “you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone" kind-of scenario. I think this is telling of a central aspect of the homeland in that it is always firmly rooted in the past, and the past is eternally far away––forever out of our grasp. 

     In Patricia Grace’s novel Potiki she tells the story of the Te Ope tribe, a community of Maori natives living in European colonized New Zealand. Grace calls this period of colonization a “contact point” because it is a crossroads between the traditional Maori lifestyle and the rapidly developing modern culture brought upon by the migrating Europeans. Among this plane of cultural exchange we are introduced to Toko, a native boy born into the the melting pot New Zealand. I empathize with Toko since his situation is so close to my own. My parents are from a homeland much like Toko’s parents and my life has been a tug-of-war between two completely different worlds. I was raised by my parents and they instilled in me the teachings of their mothers and fathers, and i was also raised by the city and all of its different pallets of people. My first language was Spanish but I speak perfect english without any hint of an accent. Personally, I appreciate the person I am because of my dualistic upbringing, it has made me into a unique individual. Rooted in the past but forever moving forward.

The Shore and the Sea:Death and Life

The Shore and the Sea:Death and Life

Almost immediately, in order to establish the home of the Potki’s protagonists, Patricia Grace utilizes simple lyrical descriptions of the land, particularly with regards to the seashore which took on a nature that, yours truly had never before experienced in a work of art. To quote directly from the work itself “the shore is a place without seed, without nourishment, a scavenged dead place”(Grace 18). However, through this death a freedom is bred as is a certain “rest” (18). By contrast the sea sits nearby. It is described just as implicitly as the shore though not as directly (Of course, this is just one person's opinion).
Mary throws that which “either lived or could live” into the sea (19), the sea is the place for life but with this life is effort, a constant straining. As a like e.g. of this consider the example of young Toko’s catching the fish. The fish is trapped literally on the line (and later on the rock while the hunt comes to a close) but in the requisite more profound reading this entrapment seems to suggest that the sea functions as an inverse of the freedom provided by the beach (frustration abounds about how English majory this sentence reads/feels. Hopefully this disclaimer makes it a little more bearable). 
Very notably the protagonists don’t want to fall into the sea (Grace 49). Hence the sanctity of death is established in the novel before the importance of life. As macabre as this may appear there’s a kind of  joy in the technique. It prioritizes the liberation of death (thus the festivities when Hemi’s mother dies) and celebrates it for it makes possible the hallowed notion of rebirth which proves to be absolutely vital in understanding the psyche of the protagonists of Potki and consequently connecting through the smog of post-modern, twenty first century, capitalistic cynicism.

Death and Toki in Potiki

I really appreciate the way in which the story is told. I can tell how this culture operates and the degree of importance they place on storytelling, their land, bonds between people, and death. What I liked best about my reading this novel was that I was able to gleam these things without the author telling me outright. That being said, I would like to explore the idea of death in Potiki. When the mother of Hemi and Mary dies, the language used observes "Absent from among the mourners was Hemi's and Mary's mother, but she was present in the photographs against the wall, and what I knew by then was that she was present amongst us in death" (27). It seemed to me an interesting way to communicate that their mother had died. Clearly, it seems the case that their cultural understanding of what it means to die differs from Western culture. the mother is dead, but she is not gone, she is just there in a different form. This makes for a home with an interesting atmosphere, one where spirits past and present are still in relation with one another. Even with the character of Toko, we learn that his coming into being has not been easy, and that he is named after the dead. The grandmother names him after her dead brother and it wold seem that he goes on to take special gifts, presumably because he has this connection with the dead. I think it is also interesting that Toko describes his mother potentially killing both him and herself when he was young by saying "she could have kept walking with me out into the water until the sea closed over us, and we would both have belonged to the fishes. But my sister Tangimoana, in her red shirt, came and snatched me away from my first drowning and hurried home with me" (42). He doesn't say that he would have died, but stresses that he would have lived in a different way, belonging to the fishes. When Toko does finally die, he doesn't just liner amongst the people in death, but becomes eternalized as well in Potiki. I think the novel is challenging our perception of death in a way that challenges Western definitions and reveals many things about the people's way of life.

Gentrification: The Death of Culture

          There are many poignant points in this tragic novel, but I want to observe the how the act of gentrification can, and in this case does, kill culture.  The reason the events of the book fall into place is because people want to develop the land for more profitable means, particularly an underwater zoo. This idea that land has no value beyond that of the monetary is part of the reasoning behind gentrification.  Instead of seeing the land for its cultural importance including the homes and meeting house of this indigenous people, they see it as a tourism profit using the local marine life. With this land being taken over by modernity, the people have no choice but to adapt and lose much if not all of their culture, or they move, which they may not be monetarily able to do and if they can then they still risk losing their culture in a foreign place.  This monetary aspect is in particular an issue in modern times as people will buy up areas in poor neighborhoods and build the area up with the fads of the day so that people with money will spend it there or even live there.  This may seem like a great thing since the area will have more amenities and cash flowing into the area, but in actuality it raises the price of living so high that people living there have to move to another poor neighborhood and small businesses, which create a culture of their own, have to shut down.  This is simply a legal, and often times favorably seen, way of killing off local culture in favor of a superficial capitalist driven pseudo culture that only a select few can truly fit and participate in.  This act tries to progressively paint a single picture of a people/culture and as a result push any unfavorable groups into ghettos.