In his foundational essay about Māori literature, Hirini Melbourne describes an expansive understanding of ‘writing’ that includes carvings, architecture and “marks on cloaks” whereby: “The fact that texts – compositions, speeches, ritual replies, and so forth – were memorized, not written down, does not mean that the ancient Māori inhabited a world from which writing was absent” (1991, p. 132). Decades later, this idea was echoed in Teresia Teaiwa’s arguments about reclaiming the ‘visual roots of Pacific literature’ (2010). The ‘visual roots’ of Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki ‘writing’ – to write, paint and narrate – are captured in the title of this thesis. In Haare Williams poem “Puakina The Spoken Word” (Williams & Ihimaera, 2019), as in this thesis, writing, painting and narrating are inseparable from each other.  

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The inextricability of critical and creative work is typical for Māori and Indigenous creatives and writer-scholars alike, including those who work within the academy. We need only look to established Māori educators such as Ngāhuia Te Awekotuku, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Vernice Wineera, Kāterina Mataira, Hirini Moko Mead, Haare Williams, and Witi Ihimaera, whose critical work as experts in their respective disciplines and professions is well known, and who also write across various creative genres of fiction, poetry and toi Māori. As a Māori woman, I am particularly interested in the multigenre approaches of wāhine Māori scholars, but also Indigenous women scholars from around the world like Konai Helu Thaman, Natalie Harkin, Anita Heiss, Haunani-Kay Trask, Teresia Teaiwa and Leanne Simpson who all thread their critical offerings into and around poetry, fiction, music, weaving and/or performance art.

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The goal of this thesis is threefold: to contemplate ways in which, and argue that, multigenre is a Māori and Indigenous creative approach that refuses to draw a line between ‘critical’ and ‘creative’, and instead reclaims and reasserts Indigenous critical work as inextricable from creative work; to expand the range of creative genres or forms that are usually celebrated within creative and literary studies and thus think beyond plays-for-theatre and books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction; and to produce a creative writing thesis that asserts my existence as a Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki wahine, and simultaneously expands the range of creative genres in creative writing programmes.

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Multigenre as an Indigenous form draws on Jeanine Leane’s docu-memory-writing approach that challenges “the great Western aversion to mixing things” (Leane, 2017, p. 249). This thesis is therefore political – not by design or topic, but by its very form: by its resistance to the ‘great western aversion’ to mixing things. Multigenre includes sole-authored publications that contain varying forms and types of creative work, as well as writing by people whose multiple publications move across different types and forms of literature. Multigenre is also a basis for collection, connection and collaboration that brings together people and knowledge for a specific kaupapa. We see such connection in sole-authored books like Words of a Kaumātua (Williams & Ihimaera, 2019), and also anthologies like Toi Wāhine: The Worlds of Māori Women (Irwin & Ramsden, 1995) and An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific (ho’omanawanui, Warren, & Bacchilega, 2024).

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As a project, this thesis sits alongside other theses within the discipline of creative writing. However, the origins of my project emerged from my Master’s degree grounding in Education and Māori and Indigenous Studies, which is also where my doctoral study began – as a literary PhD in Māori and Indigenous Studies at Waikato University. In this project I hold tight to Konai Helu Thaman’s focus on decolonising Pacific studies (2003), and Steven Winduo’s calls for Pacific writer-scholars to trace “what has been crossed out, but is visible even in erasure” (2000, p. 600). This thesis is rooted in Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki-ness, as it is also a continuation of foundational work in Pacific Studies.

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My PhD, “I write / I paint / I narrate”: A Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki kapukōrero about multigenre creative work, takes the form of four kōrero (conversations) that might occur over a kaputī (cup of tea). The concept of kapukōrero emerged from reading about kitchen table feasting and feistiness that can be found, for instance, in the pages of the excellent anthology, Around the Kitchen Table: Métis Aunties’ Scholarship (Forsythe & Markides, 2024). While drinking tea at a kitchen table is not an historic activity that Māori undertook prior to settler contact, offering kai (food or sustenance) to visitors as an act of hospitality continues to be an important ritual. However, drinking tea is more than just drinking tea. In this thesis, kaputī and kōrero at the kitchen table creates a gathering space for wāhine Māori, and for Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki wāhine specifically, to re-find and re-turn to our everyday storytelling as a type of ceremony (Markides, 2024; Wilson, 2008). The historically gendered space of the kitchen is thus reimagined as the communal space of the wharekai where people gather to be nourished. Like the ebbs and flows of kitchen table conversations, each kapukōrero in this thesis adopts Hirini Melbourne’s expansive understanding of ‘writing’ and moves through multiple types of writing, including personal reflections, literary analysis, short stories, fragments of fiction, zines, toi Māori, textile art and various forms of poetry.

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Ultimately, Indigenous literary traditions deserve to be restor(y)ed in creative writing programmes in Aotearoa New Zealand, so that our mokopuna can see us and themselves in both the creative writing legacies of our whare tīpuna, and also in tauiwi houses – if that is a place they choose to enter.

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References

• ho’omanawanui, ku’ualoha., Warren, Joyce Pualani., & Bacchilega, Cristina. (Eds.). (2024). An ocean of wonder: The fantastic in the Pacific. University of Hawai’i Press.

• Irwin, Kathie., & Ramsden, Irihapeti. (Eds.). (1995). Toi wāhine: The worlds of Māori women. Penguin Books.

• Leane, Jeanine. (2017). Gathering: The politics of memory and contemporary Aboriginal women’s writing. Antipodes, 31(2), 242-251. 

• Markides, Jennifer. (2024). The work of Métis Women: An introduction. In Laura Forsythe, & Jennifer Markides (Eds.). Around the Kitchen Table: Métis Aunties’ Scholarship (pp 1-4). University of Manitoba Press.

• Melbourne, Hirini. (1991). Whare whakairo: Māori ‘literary’ traditions. In Graham McGregor, & Mark Williams (Eds.), Dirty Silences (pp. 129-141). Oxford University Press.

• Teaiwa, Teresia. (2010). What Remains to Be Seen: Reclaiming the Visual Roots of Pacific Literature. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 125(3), 730–736.

• Thaman, Konai Helu. (2003). Decolonizing Pacific Studies: Indigenous Perspectives, Knowledge, and Wisdom in Higher Education. The Contemporary Pacific: Special Issue: Back to the Future: Decolonizing Pacific Studies, 15(1), (pp. 1-17). 

• Williams, Haare., & Ihimaera, Witi (Ed.). (2019). Haare Williams: Words of a kaumātua. Auckland University Press.

• Wilson, Shawn. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.