Michelle Keown's "Postcolonial Pacific Writing" (Book Note)

 

In "Postcolonial Pacific Writing," Michelle Keown highlights that despite some Pacific writers gaining international recognition, their works, and the region itself, remain on the margins of worldwide institutions and industries of postcolonial scholarship. Keown's goal, as implied, is to advocate for inclusion and foster a more comprehensive and informed discussion. A tactic she employs is to showcase how Pacific texts, specifically those in English from Polynesian and Māori writers, readily lend themselves to postcolonial treatment, drawing analogies to other postcolonial literatures. Simultaneously, Keown suggests that postcolonial theory can enrich the understanding and analysis of Pacific responses to colonial incursion without imposing neocolonial terms. The central strategy involves positing a dialectical relationship between postcolonial approaches, representing the global anticolonial, and an emerging canon of indigenous texts, reflecting the pan-Pacific regional.

 

The structure of Keown's book serves a dual purpose: it acts as a critical introduction to Pacific literature, particularly catering to students of postcoloniality unfamiliar with indigenous writing from the region, and it provides detailed close readings of established Pacific writers. Each chapter begins with a biographical headnote about the author, followed by summaries of their works, trajectory, narrative modes, and principal themes, often drawing on interviews conducted by Keown herself. The book also offers compact historical and cultural contexts for individual works and applies concepts from postcolonial theory to analyze specific texts.

 

The thematic organization of "Postcolonial Pacific Writing" revolves around Keown's argument, as indicated by the subtitle, that in Pacific literature, authors consciously depict history as inscribed on the body. The focus is on representations of markings on individual bodies, scars, diseases, dismemberments, and internalized responses to skin and body, seen as commentaries on the state of the indigenous body politic. Keown centralizes theorists who analyze the body, such as Frantz Fanon and Julia Kristeva, given the emphasis on corporeal imagery in the selected works. The authors under discussion, as Keown illustrates, have transformed the Pacific body, often fetishized in colonial literature, into a focal point for examining the wounds of colonialism and navigating a path toward recovery from psychosocial ills.

 

 

In the initial portion of her exploration into Pacific literature, Keown delves into the works of "Polynesian" writers, commencing with an examination of Albert Wendt. Wendt's writing, according to Keown, stands out as the most extensive exploration of the metaphorical attributes of the human body, serving as a medium to unravel the dynamics of colonialism and independence in the Pacific region. The first chapter, titled "Race, Allegory, and the Polynesian Body," illustrates how Wendt's works reject Orientalist portrayals of Islander bodies, reimagining the body as a conduit for presenting fresh conceptualizations of Islander positions in contemporary Oceania.

 

Moving to Chapter 2, Keown scrutinizes Sia Figiel's works in the context of the Polynesian female body. Figiel's writing is interpreted as a critical inquiry into idealized images of the Polynesian body found in anthropological literature and contemporary media myths. Simultaneously, it serves as an internal narrative of the subject formation of girls navigating their bodies within occasionally violent settings. Chapter 3 explores satire and scatology as methods for "Purifying the Abject Body" in Epeli Hau'ofa's work, specifically in "Kisses in the Nederends". Keown argues that Hau'ofa's work metaphorically liberates the indigenous body, embracing what has been made abject as a cathartic release from exclusionary dialectics.

 

Chapter 4 serves as a bridge to the second half of the book, discussing "Mental Illness and Postcoloniality" in Alistair Te Ariki Campbell's work. Campbell's treatment of psychosocial responses to neo-colonial pressures is considered consistent with the Māori writers discussed in the subsequent chapters. Keown presents Campbell's "The Frigate Bird” as an autotherapeutic narrative addressing psychosis and ego fragmentation resulting from Campbell's repression of his Polynesian heritage within racist institutions.

 

In Chapter 5, Keown explores Keri Hulme's "The Bone People" as an investigation of psycho-social dysfunction, expressing a broader cross-cultural disharmony within New Zealand society. Hulme's work is seen as modeling healing paradigms, acknowledging and interrogating violence before achieving regeneration and reconciliation. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Witi Ihimaera's "The Dream Swimmer" and Patricia Grace's "Baby No-Eyes”, respectively. Ihimaera's work is analyzed as an allegory for colonial incursion and the formation of twentieth-century Māori nationalism, while Grace's narrative resists Pākehā hegemony through its mobilization of Māori narrative, linguistic, and cultural codes. The final chapter, Chapter 8, explores the "Narcissistic Body" in Alan Duff's "Once Were Warriors", uncovering an underlying wounding/healing structure akin to Keown's previous analyses. Beneath Duff's portrayal of abuse, Keown identifies a critique of self-destructive aspects of contemporary Māori behavior, connected to a narcissism indicative of widespread socio-cultural malaise.