Book Review: Vincent O’Malley, The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642-1840

This general issue of MAI Journal, Volume 4, Issue 1 (2015) consists of six articles and two book reviews, covering a range of themes including Māori identity formation, Māori fire use and management practices, Māori food security and sovereignty, indigenous peoples’ experiences of entering tertiary education, as well as indigenous research methodologies

An Englishman, an Irishman & a Welshman walk into a Pa

Sport is the place to discover the best new New Zealand writers. Each annual issue is a superb snapshot of the cutting edge of New Zealand’s literary scene, and Sport 40 is no exception, offering 300 pages of fiction, poetry and essays. In honour of New Zealand’s turn as country of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012, this issue also features 133 pages of translations of contemporary writing in German. Included are some of Germany’s most celebrated writers—Durs Grünbein, Alexander Kluge, Michael Krüger. Others are appearing in English for the first time. Several—Jenny Erpenbeck, Inka Parei, Jan Wagner—will visit New Zealand in the course of 2012.fals

Tauihu

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Poutokomanawa: The heartpost

Maori and Pasifika writers cross borders with a vibrant aesthetic that exists nowhere else on the planet. Yet they are under-represented in literature—research suggests that Maori and Pasifika poetry and fiction accounts for only 3% of all locally published literature. Other ethnic groups fare worse. In this lecture novelist, essayist and creative writing teacher Tina Makereti assesses the state of affairs and presents her vision of a vibrant Maori/Pasifika/ Indigenous/NZ literature: What kind of house does our literature inhabit? Where are radical renovations needed

Frau Amsel's cupboard

Packed with new essays, poetry and fiction from 42 leading and new New Zealand writers, Sport 42 is a superb overview of current New Zealand writingfals

Monster

Why look to fiction to take the temperature of a country? You might as well ask the canary to issue a detailed report into working conditions in the coalmine. The task of the writer is to sing her own song, which may be entirely at odds with the atmosphere in which she finds herself. And yet: these three stories alert us to something in the air in Aotearoa New Zealand. The barometer swings, conditions change, and people are buffeted by circumstance, challenged by fresh strangeness. The location of each story is absolutely local – we know where we are – but the threat is diffuse, worldly, universal. As always, it’s an interesting time to be a writer in New Zealand. We are all luminaries now, writing not in the shadow but by the light of Eleanor Catton’s brilliant success, which blazes like a signal fire on the beach. Not a problem, to use the vernacular. We’ve been here before, with Katherine Mansfield’s ‘little lamp’, and we’ll be here again. Engaging the world beyond our shores, tangling with its cultural economies, and then plunging back into the hinterland, the harbour, the bare cupboard, mining our own dark past – and present and future – for literary gold.fals

By Your Place in the World I Will Know Who You Are

This collection of personal essays, a first of its kind, re-imagines the idea of place for an emerging generation of readers and writers. It offers glimpses into where we are now and how that feels, and opens up the range and kinds of stories we can conceive of telling about living here. Contributors include Tony Ballantyne, Sally Blundell, Alex Calder, Annabel Cooper, Tim Corballis, Martin Edmond, Ingrid Horrocks, Lynn Jenner, Cherie Lacey, Tina Makereti, Harry Ricketts, Jack Ross, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Giovanni Tiso, Ian Wedde, Lydia Wevers, and Ashleigh Young.falseWellington, New Zealan

Black milk

In partnership with the Commonwealth Writers, Granta is publishing the regional winners of the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, beginning with Tina Makereti’s ‘Black Milk’ – the winning entry from the Pacific.fals

Stories Are the Centre: The Place of Fiction in Contemporary Understandings and Expressions of Indigeneity. Part 1, Critical Component

Fiction written by indigenous people is an important tool for the reclamation of histories and identities, and for the imagining of alternative possibilities. Baby No- Eyes by Patricia Grace and Benang by Kim Scott are novels that address historical and contemporary experiences from indigenous points of view and therefore call into question previously known and accepted histories. By presenting alternative content and allowing for indigenous views and voices, these texts unearth discontinuities, anomalies and multiple possibilities – ultimately creating space for the authors to open up previously constricted or single-sided views of history and identity. These texts operate like historiographic metafiction, but go further than Linda Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism. Each novel culminates in new forms of creativity, signalling evolution beyond the position of ‘talking back’ and beyond reacting to the past in a colonial / postcolonial loop. In these novels, the gap left by postmodern deconstruction is filled by uniquely and fiercely indigenous (Māori, Nyoongar) contemporary solutions. Invariably these solutions contain some reclamation of traditional values, but the presence of new forms of creativity and marban/matakite abilities in Baby No Eyes and Benang in particular, suggest that contemporary solutions lie in going further and creating new understandings and ways of being. The creative component of this thesis is a novel, Rēkohu Story, which consists of three intertwined narratives: a young woman of Moriori, Māori and Pākehā descent seeks her family’s origins; a Moriori slave and his Ngāti Mutunga mistress run away together in 1882; the spirit of a man who died during the invasion of the Chatham Islands (Rēkohu) in 1835 watches over his descendants. The impetus for this novel was the author’s own mixed cultural heritage and concern that erroneous versions of the history of Rēkohu still persist. Both the critical and creative components assert that fiction can deepen understandings and expressions of history and Indigeneity

Stories Are the Centre: The Place of Fiction in Contemporary Understandings and Expressions of Indigeneity. Part 1, Critical Component

Fiction written by indigenous people is an important tool for the reclamation of histories and identities, and for the imagining of alternative possibilities. Baby No- Eyes by Patricia Grace and Benang by Kim Scott are novels that address historical and contemporary experiences from indigenous points of view and therefore call into question previously known and accepted histories. By presenting alternative content and allowing for indigenous views and voices, these texts unearth discontinuities, anomalies and multiple possibilities – ultimately creating space for the authors to open up previously constricted or single-sided views of history and identity. These texts operate like historiographic metafiction, but go further than Linda Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism. Each novel culminates in new forms of creativity, signalling evolution beyond the position of ‘talking back’ and beyond reacting to the past in a colonial / postcolonial loop. In these novels, the gap left by postmodern deconstruction is filled by uniquely and fiercely indigenous (Māori, Nyoongar) contemporary solutions. Invariably these solutions contain some reclamation of traditional values, but the presence of new forms of creativity and marban/matakite abilities in Baby No Eyes and Benang in particular, suggest that contemporary solutions lie in going further and creating new understandings and ways of being. The creative component of this thesis is a novel, Rēkohu Story, which consists of three intertwined narratives: a young woman of Moriori, Māori and Pākehā descent seeks her family’s origins; a Moriori slave and his Ngāti Mutunga mistress run away together in 1882; the spirit of a man who died during the invasion of the Chatham Islands (Rēkohu) in 1835 watches over his descendants. The impetus for this novel was the author’s own mixed cultural heritage and concern that erroneous versions of the history of Rēkohu still persist. Both the critical and creative components assert that fiction can deepen understandings and expressions of history and Indigeneity