Peri Chappelle

In the texts considered in this essay--Oscar Kightley’s Dawn Raids,  A Frigate Bird Sings and Fresh Off the Boat, John Pule’s Burn My Head in Heaven and The Shark that Ate the Sun, and Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow, Ola and Sons for the Return Home--the most significant characters share the experience of South Pacific Diaspora which takes them to the same country: New Zealand. Departing from lands where they were the subjects of colonisation to inhabit a land with its own colonial history, these characters face the prospect of being both coloniser and colonised. What is examined here is which, if either, of these two possible roles the characters see themselves as playing, and whether or not they take the opportunity to reinvent themselves. At the core of this is the relationship between race and space, both physical and metaphorical.

    In the treatment of the island cultures and peoples within the New Zealand setting, recognisable patterns emerge in a comparative study of the different texts, although these are sometimes contradictory. Kightley’s characters, for example, are often in the centre of clashes between the home and host cultures, but the Samoan culture is shown to be malleable and it is up to each individual to mold it to suit him/herself. In Pule’s novels, on the other hand, Niuean culture is seen to be rather more rigid and demanding, and therefore potentially a negative factor in the lives of New Zealand Niueans caught in an often destructive tug-of-war between the strong impulse to continue to conform to transplanted traditions and the realities of living within a dominant foreign culture. In Wendt’s texts, a clearly progressive change can be detected from the earlier Sons for the Return Home--which is the only one of all the texts that has overridingly negative things to say about the island homeland--through Ola's more positive perceptions, to Black Rainbow, a work in which the island homeland has been superseded altogether by the communal and mystical New Zealand "homeland" of the Tangata Moni.

            The various characters in the works by Kightley and Pule do not seem to be influenced in their perceptions by the considerable climatic and other geographical differences between New Zealand and their homelands. In Pule’s novels, New Zealand’s physical aspects are largely ignored, although the country is depicted in the minds of the new arrivals as a kind of materialist paradise where life will be easy. New Zealand simply is, while Niue is so intimately remembered that it almost seems to be part of the characters themselves. In Kightley’s plays, neither the physical environment of New Zealand nor that of the Island are mentioned in any detail at all. On the other hand, many of Wendt’s characters, particularly the protagonists, are very sensitive to New Zealand’s physical features, descriptions of which are woven into the texts. In Black Rainbow in particular these physical features embody a strong spiritual nature which binds those who identify with it, the Tangata Moni, to the land. By this means Wendt suggests that the island people have a great affinity for New Zealand: as great as that of the Maori and necessarily stronger than those perceived as colonisers. It is only Wendt who presents the actual physical landscape of New Zealand as  significant to the establishment of a sense of belonging, and in the most recent of his works, Black Rainbow, the underlying argument is essentialist in nature.


            In Pule’s Burn My Head in Heaven, it is stated that "the last trip to New Zealand had welded its whole world onto [Potau's] eyes" (80). However, the way of seeing that is now a permanent part of this Island man’s outlook is not that of a lush or picturesque landscape with an idyllic climate; rather, it is a world of fiscal transactions, mass-produced goods, and opportunity. For the characters in both Pule’s and Kightley’s works, New Zealand is less a place defined by its physical characteristics than one defined by its abundance of consumer products and the relative ease with which they can be obtained.  In Kightley’s Fresh Off the Boat Charles complains, "I been working in Samoa for the last twenty years, while you’ve been living in paradise... [You] have money to spend and places to go" (62).  Indeed, the only way to get away from "the incessant racket of insects scraping their legs together" is to think of New Zealand, where the streets are "bordered with shops selling clothes, ships, cartons, bottles" (Burn My Head in Heaven 81). Apart from infrequent comments about the weather (A Frigate Bird Sings 3), the working conditions, or, as Pule mentions, the supposedly ordered nature of life, there is little description of New Zealand in these writers’ works, and the vague image of a country with streets paved with gold remains pervasive even when dreams of riches dissolve in the reality of unemployment, low wages and limited disposable wealth. For these characters, New Zealand is not so much a physical entity to be claimed, as a stage on which they act out their lives.