Inside the text: The private side of Maori writing

Abstract

This essay makes a comparison between New Zealand and French attitudes towards minority literature, and argues that their oppositional reading practices might be fruitfully combined in an attempt to relocate in European contexts problematic Maori texts such as Witi Ihimaera’s Maori opera. New Zealand’s national biculturalism, which encourages assertion of Maori cultural distinctiveness, construes Maori writers and their literary texts as representative of and primarily concerned with promoting cultural and socio‐political concerns. In contrast, France’s separation of the public arena of society and politics from the private sphere of culture conceives of literature as an expression of the writer’s individual imaginary, only tenuously connected to broader socio‐political and cultural contexts. While the French approach may be criticized as denying the cultural distinctiveness of minority groups, the pervasiveness of New Zealand’s discourse of difference tends to eclipse other interpretative frameworks for creative writing. An analysis of Ihimaera’s opera libretto Waituhi: The Life of the Village (1984) that pays attention to influences from European operatic tradition suggests the importance of maintaining a view of the artist as responding to personal creative impulses as well as motivated by a role as cultural commentator.