Patricia Grace – Intra-Cultural Survivance

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Paula Morris: A Seriously Good Writer

There is one point on which readers and critics of Paula Morris’s work nearly unanimously agree, and that is (as Keri Hulme put it) that “this is someone who can write” (qtd. in Sharp 24). Lydia Wevers believes that what makes Morris “a seriously good writer” is the fact that she is “that rare thing among literary novelists – someone who can write with depth and subtlety and also tune up a plot that drives like a…Ferrari” (“Life of the City” 40). Morris’s “ear for dialogue” (Bilbrough 7) and “wicked sense of humour” (Hill 53) have earned her some of New Zealand’s top literary awards, including the Adam Foundation Prize for Creative Writing (2001), the Schaeffer Fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2002), and the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award (2003) for her novel Queen of Beauty.

Placing Morris: Biographical Context

“When I was in England people relentlessly criticised my New Zealand accent. Then I went home and I was criticised for sounding English. These days, living in the U.S, it’s all down to the choice of words. I’m generally quite good at switching, so I might say ‘elevator’ here and ‘lift’ to a New Zealander, but if I don’t correct myself someone else will. It can be a bit tiring.” (Paula Morris, qtd. in Morgan 67) As a writer, Paula Morris is very conscious that she occupies an ambiguous position in transnational linguistic space. A life spent living on three continents (Oceania/Europe/North America) has left her adept at code-switching her colloquial speech. A life spent in three different vocations (academic/publicist/writer) has left her even more adept at code-switching her professional vernacular. This adaptability is a survivance strategy, one that enables her to produce “pitch-perfect” (Potts) dialogue whether her protagonist is a Māori-Pākehā ghost writer in New Orleans (Queen of Beauty), a Chinese-Māori painter in Shanghai (Hibiscus Coast), or an all-American publicist from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, USA (Trendy But Casual).

Placing Morris: Theoretical Context

The pull between wanderlust and nostalgia is one that Salman Rushdie (a writer Morris references frequently in her non-fiction essays) feels migrants can never escape entirely. In his celebrated collection, Imaginary Homelands (1991), Rushdie asserts a belief that “exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back…” (10). The following section of this chapter examines the ways in which living in a liminal space between homelands (what Anzaldúa calls “nepantla”) allows Morris the emotional and physical distance necessary to “look back” and “look at” race relations and identity issues both in Aotearoa/New Zealand and in the United States in a way that proposes strategies for indigenous cultural survivance that Chapter Three: Paula Morris – Survivance in Nepantla 104 allow for developing “an adaptable, dynamic identity that can mediate between conflicting cultures” (Allen “Thesis” 65).

Navigating Nepantla in Queen of Beauty

“Bridges,” Gloria Anzaldúa says, “span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement – an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of ‘home’” (“(Un)Natural Bridges” 1). Paula Morris’s characters live in nepantla,73 this constant place of displacement. Their continually shifting sense of “place” and “home” is foundational to both the narrative structure of her novels and to the ways in which she navigates the nepantla space she finds herself writing in and from as an “expatriate” New Zealand writer.

New Orleans: Representative Nepantla Borderland

Morris highlights the tension that this often shifting and in-between “truth” manifests by staging the initial section of the Queen of Beauty narrative in twenty-first century New Orleans – a city that encompasses all of the characteristics of a nepantla borderland. According to the novel’s historic recounting, the nineteenth-century port of New Orleans “was the centre of the southern slave trade, with slaves on sale at more than a dozen auction houses” (21-22). It was also “the home of a unique community, les gens de couleur libre. These free people of colour, descendants of white colonists and their black mistresses, lived in relative peace and prosperity alongside the dominant Creole and American population – and their black slaves” (Queen of Beauty 22-23).

Table of Contents :

• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Finding the Cathedral Full of Song
• Chapter One: Critical Fictions and Acts of Survivance – Defining the Field
  • Finding a Kaupapa: The “Literature of Survivance”
  • What Does It Look Like? Literary Survivance in the Twenty-First Century
  • Exploring the Field and Identifying Gaps
  • Methodological Influences
  • Kaupapa Māori
  • Chapter Outline
• Chapter Two: Patricia Grace – Intra-Cultural Survivance
  • Patricia Grace: New Zealand Icon
  • Placing Grace: Biographical Context
  • Placing Grace: Theoretical Context
  • Reading Patricia Grace’s Dogside Story
• Dogside Story in an Ecocritical Context
• Whenua me te Tangata Whenua – A Health-Based Homology
• The Four Cornerstones of Māori Health
• The “Despoiling of Eden”
• “Discursive Nervousness”
• Surviving the Trauma
• Incest in Dogside Story
• The Stories Surrounding the Incest
• Rua and the Family Bed
• Maina: Working Towards Whānau Survivance
• Communicating: Pulling out the Splinters
• Taking Custody of Land and Sea
• Conclusion: Beyond Survival

• Chapter Three: Paula Morris – Survivance in Nepantla
  • Paula Morris: A Seriously Good Writer
    • Placing Morris: Biographical Context
    • Placing Morris: Theoretical Context
    • Reading Morris: Queen of Beauty, Hibiscus Coast and “Rangitira”
  • Navigating Nepantla in Queen of Beauty
  • New Orleans: Representative Nepantla Borderland
  • Māori-Chinese Identity in Hibiscus Coast
  • Emma Taupere: Navigating Identity
  • Story-Blood and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation in Hibiscus Coast, Queen of Beauty, and “Rangitira”
  • Telling Stories From “The Inside”
  • Doing the Stories Justice
  • Conclusion: “Hard Topics”
• Chapter Four: Kelly Ana Morey – Postmodern Survivance
  • Kelly Ana Morey: “A Good Little Māori Girl”
    • Placing Morey: Biographical Context
    • Placing Morey: Theoretical Context
    • Reading Kelly Ana Morey’s Bloom
  • Bloom: Morey’s “Māori” Novel
  • Tūrangawaewae
  • Whakamā
  • Whakapapa
  • Nanny Smack: Kehua and Kaumatua
  • The Lit Fire of History and Remembering
  • Nanny and the Hauhaus
  • Intertextuality in Bloom: Park and Morey’s “Uncle Pihopas”
  • Conclusion: Writing “Canons of Survivance”
• Chapter 5: This is not a Māori – Truth Beyond Tragedy
  • This Is Not a Māori
  • Give Me Room
  • Glossary / Ngā Kupu
  • Works Cited

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Spiralling Subversions: The Politics of Māori Cultural Survivance in the Recent Critical Fictions of Patricia Grace, Paula Morris, and Kelly Ana Morey