Books
I married a Maori
Published 04 September 2008
Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
Christina Thompson
Bloomsbury, 288pp, £14.99
Maoris celebrate Waitangi Day, New Zealand's national day, 6 Febraury, commemorating the treaty the British signed with them in 1840
This is not a cookbook, but eating is quite important. The first meal in the book is fish heads, not human ones. One tip for sucking fish eyes is to spit out the clear, thin case that surrounds them and the white marble of the eyeball. Nor is this book really a love story, though the union between a clever Bostonian intellectual and a rural Maori Adonis with whom she spends the night after witnessing a pub brawl, instead of taking her onward flight to Australia, is perhaps unusual. However, intermarriage in New Zealand is commonplace.
No, this book stands out because of its sharp, fine writing and the fresh glimpses it gives of New Zealand. It also goes beyond, covering a broader canvas that includes Australia and Polynesia and reaches across the Pacific to the American Midwest and New England.
Christina Thompson uses history, memoir and her own marriage to her modern-day noble savage to explain the tensions, misunderstandings and destructive outcome of "first contact", a term anthropologists use to define the original encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples. She is searching for an explanation as to why tragedy seems inevitable. What might sound dry and academic is not. Her story is told with a strong and compulsive narrative drive.
It is an extraordinary coincidence that her family landed in Massachusetts from Yorkshire in 1642, the same year Abel Tasman briefly dropped anchor at the northern tip of New Zealand's South Island and became the first European to set eyes on the country. Thompson's ancestors feared attack from Native Americans and lived in a permanent state of tension. Tasman saw members of his crew murdered, fired cannon salvos at the attacking Maori war canoes, killed their warriors and sailed away from what he later named Murderers' Bay. In both America and New Zealand the outcome was similar: the Native Americans and Maoris were eventually destroyed or dispossessed and impoverished from their contact with the west and the colonial expansion that followed.
When Thompson told her husband's brother in New Zealand that she wanted to write a story about their Maori family he suggested that she should write about her own family first. Only then did she discover her dark antecedents. A distinguished forebear had made his fortune swindling Dakota Indians in the 1850s and had helped crush their uprising ten years later when more than 200 rebels were publicly hanged en masse in Minnesota.
Thompson is an open, thoughtful person, enquiring, sympathetic, sparky and ready for adventure. She is a professional researcher and is in and out of libraries for much of the book. But her earnestness, some might say naivety, sometimes leads her astray and she misses the subtleties of life in New Zealand and the relationship between Maori and Pakeha (European), both of whom still insist, to Thompson's astonishment, that New Zealand has the best race relations in the world. She sees wealth and opportunity versus poverty and underprivilege, and she is mostly right.
The pub brawl that opens the book involves a mixed-race Maori and a blond Pakeha. When the local police arrive they take away the Maori and his companions and chuck them out of town. They leave untouched the Pakeha with his bloodied nose. As a Bostonian liberal, the author sees this as racism, pure and simple. In contrast, her husband-to-be tells her that the Maori and his mates are outsiders and troublemakers and that the Pakeha is a good bloke. She speculates on a possible link between the two communities, as if the concept of a common nationalism were beyond her. Thompson admits that the feeling of "not quite getting what was going on" would always dog her in New Zealand.
As a New Zealander, albeit one who left the country many years ago, I found my sympathies were with her husband, Tauwhitu, known to all as Seven because he was his mother's seventh child. I pitied the poor bugger being dragged back and forth across the Pacific by Thompson as she moved from one academic institution to another in Australia, Hawaii and the United States. She finally settled in Massachusetts with her parents because she and her husband, now with children, couldn't afford to live independently.
Tauwhitu is like a living anthropological specimen, watched, observed and recorded. Throughout the book, he seldom speaks. There is no hint of homesickness or frustration. We have to believe he is happy. To everyone he meets in Massachusetts, this little-educated Maori handyman is a "natural gentleman". These east coast Americans react to him in the same adulatory way that London society reacted to another Polynesian, Omai, who arrived in England with Captain Cook after his second voyage to the Pacific nearly 250 years ago. He was a curiosity, a trophy. Omai went home. Tauwhitu stayed in America.
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