Uneasy meeting places: a comparative study of short stories by Witi Ihimaera, Lloyd Jones and Owen Marshall

Abstract

In a recent interview with Vilsoni Hereniko, Patricia Grace declared, "There are characters who haven't been written about".Vilsoni Hereniko, in The Contemporary Pacific, Spring 1998, vol. 10, no. 1, p160. Grace's comment, made with reference to colonised peoples in general, was certainly true of Maori at the time that she and her contemporary Witi Ihimaera were first publishing collections of their stories in the 1970s. Much has been written since then not only about Maori, but also about Maori writers. One could even argue that a reversal has now taken place and that a number of Grace's and Ihimaera's Pakeha contemporaries have been left on the margins, largely ignored in literary criticism. Furthermore, Lydia Wevers has observed that "[s]ince the 1970s there has been a clear boundary between Maori and Pakeha writers. Much fiction by Pakeha writers has in effect ignored the Maori issues which preoccupy the media, and there has been a sense of two literatures without much cross-reference." Lydia Wevers, 'The Short Story',in Terry Sturm (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, Second Edition., Auckland; Oxford; Melbourne; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, p308. Wevers' comments echo some made by H. Winston Rhodes in 1973: