The interplay of the local and the global in Witi Ihimaera's revisions

Abstract

This article considers Witi Ihimaera’s reputation as a pioneer of Maori literature in order to analyse the way he negotiates global and local influences on his writing in the light of the claims of posterity and the obligation to the past. It examines Ihimaera’s changing attitude in his rewriting of his earliest novels, Tangi and Whanau, in The Rope of Man and Whanau II, focusing on the trope of the trauma by which Ihimaera conceptualizes the impact of colonialism on Maori communities and on his writing, and its counterpart, the image of the rope of man, which he develops in order to indicate a path from conflict to reconciliation. Noting that Ihimaera risks a seemingly uncritical celebration of globalization in his rewritings, I propose to read them with reference to a local Maori tradition, emblematized by the meeting house, Rongopai, providing a model of transformative imagination that enables readers to envisage a locally shared world.