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'You don't seem to know who you are any more.' [...] 'That's the problem with life now. No sense of place or of belonging until it's too late. I grew up knowing who I was and where I came from. Took it for granted, I suppose. Brought your father up in the pakeha world cos I thought that's what he needed. And now ...?''
THE DISRUPTION OF INDIGENOUS IDENTITY features predominantly in Maori fiction in the closing decades of Hie twentieth century. While indigenous culture and practices seem to lose their meaning, nor does the world of Päkehä modernity and Anglo-Celtic traditions seem to offer reliable notions of 'home' or 'belonging.' The above excerpt from a story by Phil Kawana explicitly evokes this sentiment of Hie second phase of Maori writing in English, voicing a crisis of identity stemming from Hie estrangement from indigenous culture, a predicament especially urban Maori were feeing at that time. Being cut off from their rural cultural base, on the one hand, and being rejected by the Päkehä world, on the other, exacerbated their sense of alienation:
Went to a good school alright.
Nobody wanted to know me because of this ...
(Touches his arms and face)
It was the same when I came back here.
Nobody wanted to know me cause I was considered white. Hell, I just wanted to know what it was like. I wanted in. [...] I just wanted in, couldn't see no place for me anywhere else.2
The devastating experience of unbelonging embodied by the character of Tero in the above excerpt from Hone Kouka's 1992 play Mauri Tu is particularly pertinent to the social reality of Maori who moved to or were born in an urban setting. Such literary texts describe city life as discriminatory, hostile, and as alien as the traditional framework offered by Hie older generation. At Hie centre of the short play is a Maori family torn apart by distance from their culture. The grandfather Matiu is Hie bearer of tradition, transplanted to the city and trying to instil a sense of indigeneity in his mokopuna (grandchildren), Waru and Tero. The boys are from a mixed marriage; their Maori father, however, denies his ancestry by adopting a Päkehä life-style. Particularly Hie...