Aliens in the Landscape: Maori Space and European Time in Margaret Mahy's Fiction

Abstract

Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters (1986), Aliens in the Family (1986), Memory (1987) and Kaitangata Twitch (2005) equate the experience of being an adolescent with the experience of being a Pakeha, a New-Zealander of European descent. They do so by making the Pakeha adolescent a chronotope of Maori space and European time. Mahy uses the fluidity of adolescence to destabilize expectations about race as self-contained and complete, and the fluidity of Pakeha identity to destabilize expectations about the boundaries between child and adult.