Mana Moana: Wayfinding and Five Indigenous Poets

Abstract

This thesis identifies diverse indigenous worlds in the published poetry of five first and second wave Pacific writers from the Moana Nui a Kiwa: Samoa, Aotearoa (Te Tai Tokerau, and Te Waipounamu), Cook Islands (Tongareva), and Hawaiʽi (Kauaʽi and Māui). Together they form a literary constellation by which I (and many others) have navigated my way as a ‘writer-scholar’ (Winduo). In order to chart these worlds, this thesis bases its critical approach in the Moana, the ocean beyond the reef (Pollex), and articulates a wayfinding kaupapa as a close reading method. Wayfinding is used to identify/chart the identity assertions, cultural signs, re-told narratives, linguistic and social references in the poetry of these writers, as well as the principal relationships deduced from published interviews and recordings, and unpublished layers within available archives. Wayfinding enables a Pacific-centric navigation through these Moanan worlds. It focuses on an indigenous frame of reference. The term ‘Moanan’ is used in the context of maintaining sociospatial connections - what Ka’ili refers to as the “Tauhi Vā” (92). To be Moanan then is to occupy and maintain the connections between such transnational and indigenous spaces of relationship, also formulated as the ‘vā’ (Ka’ili 89, 92). This identity is uniquely formed throughout each poem and each poet’s oeuvre (life-work); each author brings different sets of relationships and histories to their writing. These differences make the identity assertion necessarily porous and fluid, akin to Kamau Braithwaite’s idea of ‘tidalectics’ as developed by Elizabeth DeLoughrey in an investigation of ground-based and ocean-based discursive modes, or ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ in her comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Literatures. In a Moanan world, the reef – a liminal zone—is a fecund and porous barrier used to navigate through and hover over the signs of the texts through close reading. This thesis reads these as ‘reefs of literary production’, a modification of Bourdieu’s formulation of the field of cultural production, in order to chart the life-worlds of these texts, in addition to using related strategies drawn from a range of intellectuals and discourses inside and outside the Moana. A number of tropes are explored as modes of inquiry and are used to identify relationships between people, times and locations. These include the kīpuka, the vā, waka navigation, and deified representations of significant natural features including Tangaroa/ Tagaloa/ Kanaloa, Pele, and Papatūānuku/ Papahanaumoku. Aligned with symbolic or figured worlds, the senses and the body are also important. This accumulation of discourses and symbols is likened to traditional wayfinding techniques, particularly that of ‘expanding the target’ (Howe, Diaz) in which general locations are deduced from a range of referents. The traditional techniques rely on memory as knowledge, and recourse to the signs available in the natural world, whereas contemporary navigation relies on instruments and two dimensional charts. Through a similar indigenous navigational and holistic technique, a heterogeneous site (akin to Epeli Hau‘ofa’s sea of islands) is claimed for multi-layered streams of Moanan poetics in English within the works of the five poets. This is not claimed as an exclusive identity formation, as other formations indeed sit alongside/ entangle/ interweave/ flow within Moanan identities such as other racial, sexual preference, gender, and class formations. Rather, this thesis argues that this Moanan wayfinding Pacific-centric close reading technique makes possible the charting of five diverse indigenous worlds, five distinct oeuvres of poetry that derive energy from Moanan identities and ritenga tangata or culturally inherited ways of being.