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Maori Writing about War and Tu as a War Novel
In Patricia Grace's novel Tu (2004), about the Maori fighting in World War Two, the Tainui Maori leader Te Puea Herangi makes a brief appearance to articulate a view which was unfashionable for those times: the incongruity of Maori fighting a war of Empire on soil not their own, of participating in the colonisers' battle.1 Defying the expectation that her people should 'go away to fight for God, King and Country' Te Puea asks: 'Why would they want to fight for the people who had had stolen their country?'2 Yet the prospect of fighting was a serious temptation to young men seeking new horizons overseas and keen for adventure, and colonial troops like the ANZACs made a massive contribution in both wars although they also suffered serious losses.3 The Maori troops in World War One gained renown for their courage in Gallipoli where they fought with the ANZAC soldiers, while the Maori 28th Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF) in World War Two performed deeds of heroism in the Mediterranean and North African campaigns, being rivalled in bravery only by the Ghurkas.4
Tu develops a direction hinted at in Grace's earlier novel Cousins (1992), which tells of the lives of three women living in Wellington during and after World War Two, whose loved ones return home traumatised, in that it locates much of its action in the exclusively masculine domain of the battlefields overseas which in Cousins is only talked about.5 The novel was inspired, as Grace says in the Author's Notes, by her father's active service with the Maori Battalion in the Italian Campaigns from 1944 (283). Along with other texts published early in the new millennium, notably Witi Ihimaera's The Uncle's Story (2000), which studies masculinity and Maori identity in relation to the Vietnam War, and Alistair Campbell's volume of poetry, Maori Battalion (2001), dedicated to his brother Stuart who joined the infantry company, Division D of the Maori Battalion, it marks out the twentieth-century wars of empire as a subject for Maori fiction for the first time. Although Otto Heim has noted the previous neglect of this topic with surprise, given the central place of violence in Maori...