Bloque II. REGULACIÓN EMOCIONAL
3. Vamos al teatro
In English idiom, the word “backward” has a connotation of cultural regression, and it has been used in the past by colonisers to describe indigenous peoples and languages, alongside other derogatory terms such as “savage”, “uncivilised”, and “primitive”. However, Māori world views are founded on the idea that we must look backward as we move forward, keeping an eye on our roots as we grow and change. Every adult Māori speaker in Aotearoa can also speak English, and writing in English would give an author a wider audience, so why have the Huia authors chosen to write in Māori? The very act of Māori writers writing in te reo is a kind of return to their origins. These writers are “backwards thinking”, but not in any sense of cultural regression; rather, they are finding nourishment from their roots in order to forge new routes, new literary pathways. For these authors, Māori is the language not only of their past but also of their present.132 The way that they draw from their literary
predecessors shows that they do not view the past and present as opposing forces but rather as different points on an ever-changing, ever-growing spiral continuum, which will also become the pathway ahead into the future.
The analysis of rākau symbolism and the concept of origin in this chapter has followed several lines of enquiry. The reading of Morehu’s ‘Ko Kahikatea Ahau’ sparked a discourse
131 Jude Roberts, Mauri Ora website, Pakiwaitara, [Internet], 2008, [accessed 23
August 2009], available from
http://mauriglobal.blogspot.com/2008/06/pakiwaitara-par-key-why-tar-ra.html.
132 In Potiki, Patricia Grace writes: “What we value doesn’t change just because we look at ourselves and the
future. What we came from doesn’t change. It’s your jumping off place that tells you where you’ll land. The
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around the coming of age story which led to questions around the ways in which Māori literature itself is coming of age. This discourse raises some new questions about the audiences of Māori language literature and its purpose(s). When so much fiction in te reo has been written with an eye to teaching people how to speak the language and/or
privileging writing for children over writing for adults, where is the space for Māori-speaking authors to write freely and create works that will be read by their peers (i.e., adult, fluent Māori speakers)? The analysis of Waitai’s ‘Kōtiro’ threw up a series of questions around the dichotomy of “forest” versus “city” in Māori language literature. What do these places symbolise in this story? Why is the city so often depicted as a purely Pākehā and inherently damaging environment in Māori stories? The exploration of this text led to identifying some problems that arise from romanticising and homogenising Māori experience. ‘Kōtiro’ also had a focus on the warmth, familiarity, and nurturing aspects of the forest as a point of origin. In contrast, ‘Pai Kare’ showed a positive return to a childhood home from a city environment. The narrator of this story looked to the rākau around his Nani Puti’s home as a means of reconnecting with his past and with his kuia. ‘Te Wehenga’ was quite different in tone and structure, and it elicited an examination of the creation myth as a literary work rather than a bona-fide attempt at explaining ecological origin. The concept of origin and the symbolism of rākau echoed throughout this story on different levels, and the critical
discussion explored the genre of pūrākau/pakiwaitara as a kind of literary origin in itself. Eva Rask Knudsen links the concepts of “origin” and “legacy” within indigenous literature and notes the “perpetual interchange of beginning and end, end and beginning”.133 Knudsen also uses the botanical metaphor of “roots” alongside the concept of “routes”,
recontextualising the words in terms of indigenous literature to show how Māori and Aboriginal authors reach backwards, sideways (to each other), and forwards to the future; they explore new routes by drawing on their indigenous roots. This chapter has involved a rediscovering of literary roots and an examination of the routes explored by four of the the Huia authors. Furthermore, it has brought to light the way that roots themselves are a kind of route, in that they bring nourishment from the surrounding environment up into their host. As we consider the older, established antecedents of these stories, we become aware
133
Knudsen, p.128. Knudsen also says, “Indigenous writing proliferated … in a regenerative space where roots and routes were made to interact”. See Knudsen, p.314.
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of the new “roots” that are seeking out and laying down new “routes” to influence the growth patterns of rākau within the ngahere kōrero. These Huia stories, the traditional stories that influence them, the contemporary stories they branch out to, and even the critical work about them, like this thesis, are all part of the many interconnected dialogues that can be heard from the ngahere kōrero. This conversation is just beginning ...
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