Homeland:
Writing from New Zealand

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editors Reina Whatiri and Robert Sullivan.

In his five-volume anthology of Maori literature, Te Ao Marama,Witi Ihimaera calls the 1990s the flowering of literature written by Maori people. “We may have come to a crossroads,” he writes, “of a literature of a past and a literature of a present and future.” MANOA is pleased to showcase some of the work from this new flowering in Homeland. The writing published here was gathered by guest editors Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan, and includes some of New Zealand’s best-known Maori authors Patricia Grace, Hone Tuwhare, Alan Duff, and Ihimaera—as well as emerging and less well known writers.

Each of the pieces is an energetic exploration of homeland. Perceptions of home are also explored in essays by Susan Vreeland and David Tager, and in a symposium titled “Intimate Dwellings.” Other works in this collection include two previously untranslated stories by Nobel Prize author Yasunari Kawabata; an interview with Hugh Moorhead on his fifty-year search for the meaning of life; and, as always, outstanding North American fiction, poetry, and reviews. The art portfolio consists of photography by Hawai‘i artists Anne Kapulani Landgraf and Mark Hamasaki, known collectively as Piliamo‘o. Their work documents the restoration of the streams in Waiahole Valley on the island of O‘ahu. This too is an expression of homeland.

About the guest editors: Reina Whaitiri was born in 1943 to a Pakeha mother and Maori father. With Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith, she coedits a journal of Maori women’s writing, Te Pua. She is a member of the council of the Academy for the Humanities, Humanz, and is a tireless supporter of Pacific and Maori literature.

Robert Sullivan is Ngapuhi and Irish. Born in 1967 in Auckland, he has authored critically acclaimed books of poetry, won the PEN award for young writer of the year for his poetry and prose, and been widely anthologized.

248 pp. summer 1997 (9:1), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-1973-X
JSTOR