The Academy of Ignorance

Scott Hamilton

Paula Morris is the founder and director of the Academy of New Zealand Letters, which created the list of the twenty greatest works of fiction from New Zealand and the South Pacific being criticised in this article. These twenty works were part of a larger list of one hundred works of fiction created in the southern hemisphere.

The Academy of New Zealand Literature has published a list of the hundred best works of fiction from the southern hemisphere, in an effort to counter the northern bias of a recent list produced of the world's greatest novels produced by the Guardian. But the new list is a disaster. It makes even clearer the systematic neglect of Pasifika writers in both Aotearoa and the northern hemisphere.

The statistics are damning. The compilers claim that their category 'New Zealand and the South Pacific' covers American Samoa, Fiji, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tahiti, Tokelau, Tonga, and Vanuatu.

And yet out of twenty books in the category, eighteen—ninety percent!—were written by New Zealanders. Can the compilers of the list seriously claim to have read the important fiction produced in all the societies they named? I feel sure that they haven't.

I find it hard to believe that anyone who has read Niuean John Pule's visionary novel The Shark That Ate the Sun, which combines a high modernist structure with charged accounts of migrant life in NZ and blazing excursions into Niuean cosmology, would leave it off the list.

Nor do I think that anyone who has read Dewe Gorode's short stories, with their linguistic energy and their synoptic gaze over Kanak society and one hundred and fifty years of often tragic drama, would prefer Maurice Shadbolt's lumbering historical novel about Olympic runner Jack Lovelock.

Even widely known Pasifika writers have been shunned. Sia Figiel's name does not appear on the list, despite her Commonwealth Prize, the dozens of translations of her work, and her creation of a new literary form that fuses Western and traditional Samoan storytelling.

It is not only indigenous Pacific island writers who have been left out the list. Subramani's short stories have reached a mass audience in Fiji, and been immensely influential on younger writers. But he's never had an audience in Aotearoa, and so the compilers have likely not heard of him.

The wrong type of fiction

The Academy has also carried over some of the Eurocentric bias of the Guardian's list of great books. Although they offer a list of books created in the southern hemisphere, they follow the Guardian's precedent by ignoring the unique forms literature has found outside Europe.

The compilers for the Guardian regarded the novel as something born in early modern Europe, ignoring the texts established much earlier in societies like Japan and China, even well-known masterpieces like Murasaki Shikabu's eleventh century Tale of a Genji. Fiction also has a very long history in the Pacific.

In many Pacific societies fictional stories were carefully distinguished from oral history and from discourse about the natural world. Narratives were passed down for centuries, with the help of mnemonic devices, and have in the last two centuries been compiled and edited into books. This ancient Pacific tradition of fiction is completely ignored by the compilers of the list.

Today most scholars accept that Māori and other Pacific peoples preserved scientific knowledge in their oral traditions and practices. The fact that knowledge about, say, oceanography and navigation wasn't written down doesn't make it non-scientific. In the same way, the traditional literature of Pacific societies held that status despite the fact that it was transmitted orally, using mnemonic devices.

Geographical hijinks

The Academy's definition of 'South Pacific' is peculiar, and excludes parts of the region. The Marquesas Islands have an extraordinary literary history. They are  known amongst Western readers because they provide the setting for Melville's early novel Typee, a barely disguised account of his desertion from an American vessel and his encounter with Polynesian culture. Scholars like Niel Gunson and Nicholas Thomas have been more excited by the collection of Marquesan songs compiled by an obscure beachcomber called Lawson in the nineteenth century. The songs include long and detailed accounts of the creation of the universe, as well as a genealogy of Queen Victoria that gives her Marquesan ancestry and a lament about fleas.

Yet the Marquesas Islands are not part of the Academy's bizarre definition of the South Pacific. The Academy lists Tahiti as part of the South Pacific but not any other parts of 'French' Polynesia.

The translator of the Talanoa ki 'Uvea now uses the name Lose Vasalua Jenner-Helu. Jenner-Helu first translated the text into Tongan and then shaped it in English. Although it was put on paper by a French priest at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Talanoa ki 'Uvea collects stories that have been transmitted orally for many generations. 'Uvea has attacked and eventually colonised by the Tongan Maritime Empire four and a half centuries ago, and the motu is still marked by forts built by the invaders. 'Uvean culture profoundly influenced Tongan culture in the same way that Greek thought and literature influenced the conquering Romans. 

'Uvea is another piece of the South Pacific mysteriously excluded from the Academy's definition of the region. Translated into Tongan and English by Lose Jenner-Helu, the Talanoa ki 'Uvea is the prose epic of the 'Uvean people—their Aeneid. 'Uvea and its neighbour Futuna are distinct island nations administered together as a colony by France—and yet, for the Academy of New Zealand Literature, they don't exist.

The colonial prism

After I criticised the Academy's list on twitter, someone defended it by claiming that the islands of the tropical Pacific 'have a vastly smaller population than New Zealand'. Many Pākehā would probably instinctively agree with the claim. Some of us have a tendency to think of the Pacific as a region of small islands with small populations, a chain of atolls of volcanoes in a vast and barren ocean.

But we're wrong. Aotearoa New Zealand has just over five million people. The other nations in the New Zealand Academy's list—American Samoa, Samoa, Fiji, Tuvalu, Niue, Nauru, PNG, Vanuatu, the Solomons, Tonga, Tahiti, and New Caledonia—together have over thirteen million people. Some of the nations on the list—Tuvalu, Niue—are small, with small populations, but others certainly are not.

The majority of the thirteen million live in Papua New Guinea, a nation with over eight hundred languages and an ancient tradition of fiction. The Be Jijimo section of New Guinea's National Museum documents and celebrates the country's storytelling tradition. In addition to this traditional literature, Papua New Guinea has a rich body of written literature, including short stories and novels as well as poems and plays. New Guinea's fiction writers draw on both their own traditions and outside influences.

Russell Soaba poses with two of his books. Soaba made his debut as a writer in the seventies, and has created a sizeable oeuvre.

Russell Soaba's Maiba is one of the finest novels from New Guinea. Its heroine is the daughter of the last traditional chief in a village where lifeways have been disrupted by colonisation and commerce. The mana bestowed by her ancestry is balanced against the prejudice she encounters as a woman. Soaba is still writing and teaching at Port Moresby's university. This year he has published The Bird in the Bird Dance, a collection of old and new stories. But, like many writers from the tropical Pacific, Soaba is almost unknown in Aotearoa.

I could name a score of distinguished Pacific writers, past and present, who haven't been published widely or at all in Aotearoa and lack a reputation here. It is significant that the only two Pacific writers who have made the Academy's list, Epeli Hau'ofa and Albert Wendt, both have high profiles in New Zealand, with Wendt having spent much of his life here. Hau'ofa and Wendt are visible to the Academy in a way someone like Soaba is not.

There is something very colonial about the way the Academy has looked at South Pacific literature through the prism of New Zealand. I see a parallel with the way that British literary journals and newspapers used to treat postcolonial writing. For a long time VS Naipaul was treated as almost the only important writer from the Caribbean, simply because he was based in the United Kingdom and published and acclaimed there. In the same sort of way, Salman Rushdie often stood in for the whole of Indian literature in the eighties. Indian writers who were read and reviewed in their homeland but not in Britain were discounted.

Russell Soaba or Dewe Gorode or Titaua Peu or John Pule may not have their books in print in New Zealand, but that does not mean they are not important writers. The Academy's list gives no hint that literature is thriving and finding new subjects and forms in the tropical Pacific.

The wrong type of Pākehā novel

The Academy's list doesn't only ignore Pasifika books. It snubs Pākehā writers who have tried to explore and understand the Pacific.

Roderick Finlayson's 1953 novel The Schooner Came to Atia—the title barely disguises its setting on the island of Atiu, in the Cooks—is a tautly written indictment of New Zealand colonialism and Protestant sexual repression. An arrogant and ignorant colonial administrator struggles to transform 'his' island into a fragment of Pakeha New Zealand, but eventually becomes aware that he is dependent on indigenous chiefs to enforce his laws and mobilise labour for his public projects.

A missionary falls in love with one his domestic servants, but she is attracted to a convalescent who has arrived on the island, a young man traumatised and turned pacifist by the recent war. The missionary shoots his rival, though his crime is disguised as a hunting accident.

Finlayson's prose is cool and clear and his story has the simplicity of a fable. His unusual perspective, as a Catholic bust also a sort of anarcho-primitivist, allows him to empathise now only with the colonised Cook Islanders but with the New Zealanders attempting to 'civilise' them.

Michael Henderson's Log of a Superfluous Son is gloriously excessive where Finlayson's novel is restrained. Its protagonist has taken a job shovelling shit on a ship moving doomed cattle from Auckland to Korea.

His crewmates seem permanently drunk, and much of the novel consists of their fantastic conversations, which careen from the scatological to the sexual to the political. In Micronesia the ship encounters a menacing American navy.

Like The Schooner Came to Atia and The Log of a Superfluous Son, Ian Wedde's Symmes Hole shows a Pākehā pulled out of the comfort zone of his homeland, and forced to deal with the vastness and strangeness of the region beyond.

For Wedde's protagonist the journey is more mental than physical. He lives in Aotearoa's capital city and hates its neo-colonial smugness. After losing his mind and his memory he tries to reconstitute himself by entering the consciousness of a 19th century whaler, a white whale he hunts through library archives.

Wedde shows us how Pakeha whalers and sealers jumped ship, married into iwi, and helped create a series of bicultural, unashamedly heathen, egalitarian societies that stand in contrast to the colonial nightmare made later by Wakefield and Grey.

Symmes Hole was written while Aotearoa was suffering its own breakdown, as the economic crises of the last Muldoon years were succeeded by the savagery of Rogernomics. Wedde's vision of a precolonial, prelapsarian NZ is still radical in 2026.

Maurice Shadbolt was a very uneven writer, but Danger Zone finds him at his best. He got the raw material for the novel when he joined a protest flotilla that journeyed to Mururoa atoll to observe a nuclear explosion.

But in Danger Zone both the French and their opponents are steered by obsessions deeper than politics, and what begins as a protest turns into an endless voyage reminiscent of Donald Crowhurst's deranged drift through the Atlantic. There are parallels, too, with JG Ballard's novel Rushing to Paradise, which shows another environmental activist losing their mind and succumbing to hoary colonial fantasies about the Pacific as an ocean of marvels and monsters. 

All the books I've mentioned are long out of print. Aotearoa has marginalise not only Pasifika writers but palangi who have rejected the myth of NZ's isolation and treated the ocean around their homelands as a road rather than a moat.

Translated into Tongan & English by Lose Jenner-Helu, the Talanoa ki 'Uvea is the prose epic of the 'Uvean people—their Aeneid. 'Uvea & Futuna are distinct nations administered together as a colony by France—& yet, for the Academy of NZ Literature, they don't exist.

The Academy has created a list of the 20 best works of fiction from NZ & the South Pacific that includes 18 NZ works. Neither 'Uvea nor Futuna appear on the Academy's list of South Pacific societies. It's hard to know the literature of a place when you aren't aware it exists.

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