<em>E Tu</em>: On Teaching Patricia Grace’s Novel of the Māori Battalion

Abstract

In her award-winning historical novel Tu (2004), a tale of three brothers fighting in the famous Maori Battalion during the Second World War, New Zealand author Patricia Grace takes up those twin themes of violence and mythology at the heart of much New Zealand cultural self-reckoning and succeeds in producing one of the country's most significant contemporary works of literature. In contrast to other recent, popular expressions of New Zealand cultural identity, for example the domestic violence of Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors and the regional Maori mythology of Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider, Tu embraces the true Odyssean story of the Maori warriors who sailed offin 1943 to serve with the Allied Army in the fiercest fighting in Italy and northern Africa, and the book neither sensationalizes the violence nor escapes into mythological closure. Instead, it reveals the heavy burden of pride assumed by the battalion, the tragedies of the campaigns fought, and the larger futility of violence itself. The novel is also a romantic homefront mystery, a love letter to Wellington city, a tale of sibling love and rivalry, and a portrait of Maori urban migration. With its epic canvas stretching from Taranaki, Wellington, and the towns of New Zealand across the Indian Ocean to South Africa, Egypt, and Italy, Tu is also a properly international New Zealand novel, capturing an aspect of the quintessential overseas experience, which increasingly has become part of the New Zealand national character. Unlike the aforementioned, domestically set New Zealand stories, Tu is a tale of New Zealanders in the world-overseas and at home- and as such makes an ideal text for students and teachers new to postcolonial New Zealand literature as well as those looking to study it in greater depth.One priority for teachers introducing students to the context of Grace's work is to emphasize the pioneering role Grace has played in New Zealand literature. A descendant of the Maori tribes or iwi Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa, Te Ati Awa, and affiliated to Ngati Porou by marriage, Grace became, in the 1970s, a key figure in the emergence of Maori writing in English (Oxford Companion 214). Her main early work, the short stories of Waiariki (1975) and first novel Mutuwhenua (1978) met with considerable acclaim and established her as an important female voice in Maori culture, a representative of what Nadia Majid has called the first phase of the Maori novel in English, where the main setting is the Maori community, where characters and readers are introduced to concepts of Maoritanga, and where race relations with Pakeha (or non-Maori New Zealanders) are largely unsatisfactory. Grace's next novel was Potiki (1986), a story of a Maori community on ancestral land threatened by commercial property developers. This is perhaps Grace's most critically discussed work, a good example of Majid's second phase of Maori writing, in which the drama plays out on turangawaewae, or standing ground, and in which relations with Pakeha are mostly strained and confrontational (251). Later came the family-focused dramas Cousins (1992), Baby No-Eyes (1998), and Dogside Story (2001), the latter a tale of an East Coast Maori community's dilemmas in hosting millennium celebrations. Grace has, of course, written other story collections, children's literature, and the true love story of Ned and Katina (2009). But it is Tu that clearly belongs to Majid's third phase of the Maori novel, in which settings extend beyond Aotearoa New Zealand and in which Maori-Pakeha relations are more open, tolerant, and inclusive (251). It is Tu that arguably represents some of Grace's maturest writing. She has won several national and international awards for her writing, including the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the Deutz Medal for Fiction, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 2007 was honored as a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to literature. …