ROUTES AND ROOTS: NAVIGATING CARIBBEAN AND PACIFIC ISLAND LITERATURES
ELIZABETH M. DELOUGHREY
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I PRESS, HONOLULU, 2007

REVIEW: DR. CATHIE KOA DUNSFORD

He moana pukepuke a ekingia e te waka
A perilous sea can be navigated
[Maori whakatauki]

It is seldom that great scholarship and great writing combine to form an evocative, compelling and stunningly researched book that is as gripping as reading the finest novel. Even more unlikely is the possibility that the scholar has a deep, accurate and respectful knowledge of indigenous regional politics, geography, languages, literatures, oral cultures and talkstory. The task of bringing together relevant issues for both Carribean and Pacific Island literatures is vast and has never been achieved before. Add to this the strength and ability to bring to the surface the often hidden or colonised stories of indigenous women, sometimes obstructed by colonial and indeed, so called, “post-colonial” scholars and regimes.

I state “post-colonial” thus because, like the invention of “post-feminism” for those of us at the coal face of both issues as indigenous feminist scholars and writers, we know well that the forces suppressing our indigenous feminist voices are still ongoing despite the welcome changes over the past decades. Thus a book of scholarship that brilliantly allows these other perspectives to surface in the way Dr. DeLoughrey does here breaks new boundaries and offers new perspectives in to a radically new kind of scholarship that is truly inclusive.

I recently discovered this book and author when Opening Keynote Speaker on Kaitiakitanga at the International Oceanic Conference on Creativity and Climate Change at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji [1]. Other island and global scholars, writers, activists, artists and visionaries were there to contribute to a vital international discussion which focused on the forces of creativity to help come up with solutions. I focused on Kaitiakitanga – the Maori concept for guardianship of the land and seas and of all planetary resources, which has been a part of our Pacific Island cosmology since time began and throughout all our voyages as perhaps the greatest navigators in history. Little did I realise at the time I was about to meet an author and scholar who was capable of drawing all the strands of Kaitiakitanga together in one of the most brilliant books of scholarship I have ever had the joy of reading or reviewing in my forty year career as a university lecturer, scholar and writer.

No review could do justice to the depth and breadth of the scholarship in this book. I can only delineate some of the highlights and urge readers to buy and share this book with others and especially use it as a text in universities, schools and in any curriculum that seeks to understand cross cultural scholarship of this richness and brilliance.

I have studied Pacific navigation texts for many years and also witnessed the era of rediscovery of the voyages of our ancestors and tracing them by rebuilding large sea voyaging waka and studying navigation through the legacy left us by Mau Piailug and others. It is so apt that Elizabeth DeLoughrey chooses the metaphor of navigation as central to her discourse and the title of Routes and Roots to describe the interlinking of themes where one could not exist without the other.

The author breaks through the “cartographic hierarchy of space” in the knowledge that “our maps do not chart a shared islandness across the globe.” This immediately took me back to my time teaching cross-cultural indigenous feminist literature while on a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, 1983-6. On the day we studied Audre Lorde’s ZAMI, where she talks about the startling fact that no maps represented Carricou in the Carribean Islands where she was raised, the USA invaded Grenada. That shocking event where Goliath invaded David made sure all the students knew where she came from and during that time I saw a huge shift in consciousness take place amongst my students, which I documented in poem for Audre Lorde, The Miracle of Survival, in a bi-lingual poetry collection, Survivors, commissioned from me by the University of Osnabrueck [2].

I had talked at length with Audre about the issues as I had also felt invisible emerging from an island in Aotearoa about which few people in contemporary USA knew anything. We laughed about coming from terra nullius and said that meant we could do anything as we did not have to follow the laws of the colonisers since their maps meant we did not even exist! Fellow writers and activists joined us in the joke. But behind it was the truth that so long as we remained terra nullius, then the colonisers could continue to take our land and explode our islands in the Pacific with nuclear bombs as America and France had been doing for decades. We had to make sure, in our writing and our activism, that our issues were raised, debated and that creative solutions could be found. I later talked these issues over with Michelle Cliff and Jacqui Alexander, authors and critics also from the Carribean who’d also endured an English colonial upbringing with all the lies, corruption and negation of our true histories that come with that brain-washing system of education.

At that time, scholars with the breadth and depth of knowledge of Elizabeth DeLoughrey were not common. Sadly, they are still not common. All the more exciting that we can spread the word of this book which so eloquently raises the issues and argues for more inclusive cross-cultural perspectives based upon a deeper and more ethical knowledge of the island communities whose literatures, both oral and written, she reads and listens to.

She argues that with the often arbitrary distinction between continents and islands, colonisers used geography to support “a series of cultural and political assumptions”. To bring back the importance of te moana, the ocean, which is vital in all island discourse [and indeed in our daily lives], she uses Kamau Braithewaite’s theory of “tidalectics” which she describes as a “methodological tool that foregrounds how a dynamic model of geography can elucidate island history and cultural production, providing the framework for exploring the complex and shifting entanglement between sea and land, diaspora and indigeneity, and routes and roots.” [3] And how!

Most island peoples define themselves, as contemporary Maori often say, as having the blood of the sea coursing through their bodies. We feel the sea waving through us as others feel blood pulsing through them. We are the sea and the sea is us. This scholar understands this notion from deep within and uses the metaphors of navigation throughout the book to uphold the vital importance in altered perspective that this gives us. As Kaitiaki or guardians of both sea and land, of our entire planet, we cannot abuse and pollute and consume and cause climate change if we are to uphold our traditional Kaitiakitanga as Pacific peoples any more than Carribean or other island nations. At the core of this notion is the creative solution, long known by our ancestors, to solving the current crises we face. But whether we are ready as global nations to take on the responsibility of looking after our mokopuna and the new generations or whether we opt for global greed is another question.

The author examines our Carribean and Pacific Literatures in minute detail with an accuracy seldom found in authors living outside the indigenous regions she is describing. This shows that such authoritative scholarship can be enacted by those willing to listen to others and willing to voyage and navigate their ways through complex seas, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey has done here.

Not only is her work tracking old roots and laying new navigational routes for the future of our cross-cultural literature and visionary ways of working together, she is also exploring new perspectives which can inform and invigorate cross-cultural literary and global debate. Her writing is sharp, intelligent, exciting and has the flair needed to go on such vast literary navigational journeys.

This book marks a change in scholarship that shows a new way forward where voices that have been previously suppressed now become known for their ancestral wisdom and acknowledged for their literary vision. Our Carribean and Pacific Literatures have for too long been sidelined by mainstream scholars or taught without a deep knowledge of their roots. I was recently lecturing in Europe and came across a respected European scholar teaching Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka. The poem mentioned the famous NZ Government’s paltry offer of a “fiscal envelope” to buy off all Maori tribes as compensation for land stolen and confiscated by colonial governments. The professor deconstructed the poem but skimmed over the central line mentioning the fiscal envelope. When I asked him what it meant he had no idea. I was stunned that such a vital moment in our history as the rejection of the famous fiscal envelope, thus forcing true negotiations to continue and the history to be told and both fiscal and state recognition to be granted in terms of money and, sometimes even more importantly, in terms of state apology for the transgressions and genocide, so vital to any understanding of the poem, could be glossed over by such a respected academic. He begged me to be quiet about it.

I have no desire to ‘out’ the professor who clearly felt he was doing his best. However, it made me wonder how many more times our literature is taught in Commonwealth and Post-Colonial courses with a Eurocentric or Western perspective, ignoring or misunderstanding the very heart of our work? I know from following literary criticism that many of us as Pacific and Carribean writers and scholars have no choice but to laugh at so much of the material that is published. It’s like our island relatives making up stories to please Margaret Mead so they could be left in peace. We come from a line of great storyellers. What can you expect when we are not truly listened to?

All the more reason to celebrate such scintillating scholarship as this. I scanned the pages, expecting to confront at least a few errors, which would be natural covering such a wide area of geography and literature. Within the Pacific Island and Aotearoan pages, I could find nothing but admiration for an ability to discover the very nature of the sea-blood that flows through our veins and to follow and track new navigational routes for us to feel excited by the journey and want to lay/ley the lines for future voyages using our ancestral and contemporary knowledge.

From Tidalectics to Landfall, this book parts the waves for all readers to come to an appreciation of our Carribean and Pacific Island literatures and I am among many who wish to thank Associate Professor DeLoughrey, UCLA, for taking the time to navigate this complex path through our often rough oceans to allow others to see our literatures in a new light, quite literally, reading by the stars.

It is not possible to summarise the complexity and brilliance of this material other than to urge all readers, scholars, teachers, writers, artists, visionaries, anyone who loves fantastic mo-olelo – causing the spirit to fly between people in the process – to read and share this book with others so that the rest of the world can begin to understand our island literatures in an ancestral and indigenous literary context that honours our journeys on all levels. May this book pave the way and act as a navigational star, lighting the sea for other scholars to journey towards in their voyaging works of discovery.

Notes:

1] Kaitiakitanga - Protecting our Oceans, Islands and Skies by Inspiring a Climate Change of Consciousness, Opening Keynote Speech, Cath Koa Dunsford, International Oceanic Conference on Creativity and Climate Change, University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji, Sept 13-17, 2010.
[papers to be published in Dreadlocks Literary Magazine, USP, 2011 and live presentations on dvd:
(http://www.usp.ac.fj/index.php?id=9020).

2] The Miracle of Survival – For Audre Lorde, Survivors/Uberlebende,pp90-99,  Cathie Dunsford, edited by Prof. Sigrid Markmann, University of Osnabrueck Press, Germany, 1990

3] Routes and Roots Navigating Carribean and Pacific Literatures, Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Tidalectics, p2, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2007.

[c] Dr. Cathie Koa Dunsford, 2010.

Cathie Koa Dunsford [Te Rarawa/Ngapuhi/Hawai’ian/Croatian] is author of 24 books in print and translation in USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Turkey, including the popular Cowrie novel series featuring strong tangata whenua and eco activists from the Pacific region promoting Kaitiakitanga for our shared global survival. She has taught Literature, Creative Writing and Publishing at Auckland University since 1975. Dr. Dunsford is director of Dunsford Publishing Consultants, which has brought 197 new and award winning Pacific authors into print internationally. Cath is recipient of two major literary grants from Creative New Zealand Arts Council and was International Woman of the Year in Publishing in 1997. She is on the Board of the Asia Pacific Writer’s Network and recently taught workshops at Artspeak Pasifika, 2010, funded by CNZ, NZ Arts Council. Cath Koa has performed her work at the Frankfurt, Leipzig and Istanbul Bookfairs. She was recently keynote speaker on Kaitiakitanga at the international Oceanic Conference on Creativity and Climate Change at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. A documentary of her work has been directed for Maori Television by Makerita Urale. She tours the world performing from the books with traditional Maori waiata and taonga puoro. Contact:
(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) & http://www.dunsfordpublishing.com

[c] This review may be copied in full or quoted in context so long as all details are credited to book and review authors.