Powhiri of Welcome: Toia mai….

My welcoming powhiri is a traditional Maori one that has been used for centuries. In Maori culture, the ancestors are always behind us, with us and projecting us forward into the future. It is our task to be as present as possible to the voices from the past to inform the present and allow us to move into the future. One of the ways this is possible is by reconnecting with our own mythologies and the layers of spirituality that unfold from this process and to move forward into the world of light as modern day visionaries. Without this visionary tuning in, then we are simply re-acting to the politics of the past and present. We have few tools to move into the future.

It is not always easy to do this in a world wedded to the colonial politics of destruction and annihilation, be this by invading other countries, contributing to global warming that encourages the turbulent weather crises we face today,  attempting to destroy our cultures and languages, feeding us toxic food or expunging our vibrant and healthy differences through globalisation. Indeed it is vital that we do grapple with some of these issues in our work. But we must not fall into the trap of being destroyed culturally and spiritually by these forces.

I will never forget the day I read these words from Black author Toni Cade Bambera in her book The Salt Eaters: “To collude with depression is to collude with the enemy”. The forces of colonisation, which are still as vibrant in Iraq and many of our own Asia-Pacific countries today as they were when foreign invaders took over our countries and islands, are intended to oppress us and keep us down. One of the most powerful things we can do as writers is en-vision a world beyond these oppressive politics of destruction and depression.

If you really want to create a literary storm - write visionary novels. The critics hate them with a passion. Why? Because instead of re-acting to their oppression and remaining within their control, we are finally taking the courage to move beyond these borders and boundaries created by those who want to control us. We are acting out of the inner knowledge that our ancestors and our cultures have held as sacred for centuries. We are bringing this knowledge into the present and transforming it into a constructive and positive future. One of the most empowering things we can do is en-vision our own and our children’s futures through the power of our imaginations.

This does not mean we need to refrain from criticising or commenting on present and past atrocities. Indeed, we can use these as tools in our re-visioning of ourselves as we sail our waka or canoes forward and discover new areas of our shared cultures. For instance, in Manawa Toa, I talk about the nuclear holocaust in the Pacific in reference to the deliberate genocide of Maohi or Tahitian people by the French. We had the most amazing debates on this when touring Germany with the books. My publisher at Rogner and Bernhard, Antje Landshoff is Jewish. She understood the connexion. But those unaware of the Pacific nuclear holocaust did not. I used the words of Maori politician Tariana Turia regarding the genocide of Maori iwi at Taranaki to support my case. They were words heard. But why? It was because in the Cowrie series I offer solutions, visionary alternatives to war and destruction of our planet and her peoples. I use the wisdom and mythology and spirituality of the past to inform and envision a better future. That 100% of Maori submissions were against genetic engineering helped when writing Ao Toa: Earth Warriors. Here the visionary future was already whispered by the present tangata whenua, people of the land.

We have good reason to celebrate. Indigenous people are the majority of the world, even though this world is currently ruled by the 12% of white men who have profited from sales of our land and ideas. We need to make our voices heard and we need to give strong direction to the alienated youth within all our cultures, who are calling out for a visionary politics, a visionary literature, a visionary future.

Faced with leukaemia, I made the decision to move my politics of thirty years of fighting and protesting on the streets and on the seas against nuclear weapons towards a vision of a nuclear free future for all the Pacific. I shifted my attention from the streets to literature. I realised it was not enough to write against the destructive colonial forces, but I had to begin to envision what possible futures might look like. For me this meant creating a new genre of literature, one where strong indigenous women became the central characters in my series of anti-nuclear eco novels. I wanted to see if I could create a form of oral literature on the page, really capture the energy, humour and empowerment of indigenous people, and women in particular. First they had to go back to the past, find out about their roots, before they could move forward.

Once I pushed my waka out onto these seas, there was no going back. The novels really took off and indigenous women from all over the world began telling me how much they related to these stories. Indeed, people from all backgrounds felt moved to write and ask me to tour with the books so that they could hear the sounds of the words. What began as an empowerment for indigenous women also empowered indigenous men, and then grew to empower people of other races from the Asia-Pacific region, who connected with the stories, and also those from other cultures who said they finally felt empowered to do something about the colonial oppression within their own countries. Key to this is the ability to envision a new world, a better world, and new ways of behaving towards each other.

This gave birth to a massive global touring schedule, between the writing, where I began to include traditional and new Maori waiata, songs, and instruments interweaving between the words. I now travel with one of the book’s foreign translators, Dr Karin Meissenburg, who is also a musician and expert on Asian-American literature on Great Turtle Island and the Asian-Pacific Coast of USA. And we have turned the readings into performances to capture some of the energy and traditions behind and informing them. So in this way we carry our ancestors with us on the journeys and always have them to tune into as we move the words and songs, into the future in our performances.

As I progressed with the Cowrie novel series and they were sold by my Melbourne publishers, Spinifex Press, at the Frankfurt Bookfair and the novels translated into German and into Turkish, I realised that these novels of protest against nuclear power, warfare, genetic manipulation and destruction of the environment were also novels of peace and hope. They became celebratory. The dominant power shifted from the oppressors to those defining their own alternative ways of living, those imagining a better universe and finding specific ways to enact this on their own terms. The novels became visionary. And while dealing with issues dear to us in the Asia-Pacific region, they also spoke to a world wide audience of very different cultures without compromising our own politics. This is because they dared to be visionary. .

But my characters do not act alone. The main character, Cowrie, is clearly set up in the first novel as one of both Maori and Hawai’ian ancestry. She explores her whakapapa, or ancestry, and in doing so, we see she has a mythical counterpart who guides her along the way – Laukiamanuikahiki- Turtle Woman. She is supported by her mythical sister, also an orphan, and gradually we realise that the present day character draws on the strength of the past, of her ancestors, in order to be able to work in the present and move into the world of light. Laukiamanuikahiki swims beside Cowrie throughout the series, and as she travels the globe, she encounters other mythical beings. By the time the characters come to protest and predict the shut down of the nuclear power plant, Dounreay, in Caithness, Scotland, the selkies or seal women of Orkney mythology have connected with the main character, Morrigan, as she follows her path as a fisher and finds ways to work with Caitlin, a modern day Celtic witch or medicine woman, to help bring down the power plant.

When I first started writing this book, Dounreay was a hideous reality. At Dounreay, they “lost” enough plutonium for another three Hiroshimas. They lost it? More like they sold it off to third world countries. But by the last editing stages of the book, the announcement that Dounreay was being shut down became just one of many witchy realities that can happen when us writers dare to imagine a nuclear free world and dare to write about it. The same happened as I was writing Manawa Toa, Heart Warrior, during the last series of French tests at Mororoa and Faungta’ufa Atolls. I predicted the end of testing. During the editing stages of the novel, France announced the end of testing and cut back on the final tests.

While writing the sequel to Song of the Selkies, the Return of the Selkies, the seal women invade and set free and kill fish from a fish farm, full of toxic residues, so that the issues are out in the open. At the time the Scottish fish farm industry was on a hideous high and becoming a huge threat to the wild salmon. By the time the book was edited, the closure of several of the most productive fish farms was beginning. Again, the literary vision predicted the outcome. I know I am not the only writer this has happened to. Many others in the Asia-Pacific region have been visionaries who have dared to imagine better worlds and dared to express themselves and their visions.

It is not just in the writing process that we need to be visionary. I have found that inventing a visionary structure within which to read and perform the work globally has helped other cultures to identify and connect to the writing. By touring with our taonga, or sacred treasures, we connect with audiences on an emotional level, a heart level, as well as through their minds and imaginations. We cover the stage in lavalava, or patterned cloth telling the stories of our people. We take along our sacred musical instruments, such as koauau or bone flutes and putorino, larger clay flutes and the conch shells, so that readers can gain a sense of the worlds they are entering. We read the words and sing and play between and beneath them. This works particularly well on the European tours where I read in English and my translator in the language the book has been translated into. In Both Germany and Turkey, the translators contributed to the performances and the readers could hear the words in the original language and also in translation. The music helped to bridge the cultural gap and take them deeper on the inner. Readings at the Frankfurt, Leipzig and Istanbul Bookfairs all benefited from this visionary process. We also stay at least an hour after each performance talking about the taonga, sacred treasures, the books, the ideas and sharing as writer, translator and readers and this is vital when we want to reach other cultures with our visionary ideas.

It is vital that while we fight against all forms of colonial oppression, that we celebrate our own powers of imagination and existence at the same time. We gain strength in our joining together. We gain strength by imagining better worlds. We gain strength by writing about what we imagine and putting our ideas into print that others can take heart and begin to imagine the possibilities of their own lives and the futures of all our children.

I call upon our Maori Goddess of Music and words sung into life, Hine Raukatauri, to help bring us all into the world of light and take the courage to include this vision in our writing.

Hine Raukatauri, unuhia ki te ao marama, draw forward into the world of light.

Mahalo. Kia ora koutou.

[c] Dr. Cathie Dunsford

Notes:

Manawa Toa, Heart Warriors, Ao Toa, Earth Warriors and all the other books in the Cowrie series can be viewed in the following websites:
http://www.spinifexpress.com.au [English]
http://www.christel-goettert-verlag.de [German]
http://www.okuyanus.com.tr [Turkish]