The White Whipping Boy: Simon in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

Abstract

In Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Simon is a white-skinned, blondhaired, blue-eyed child who represents both the Pakeha (white) colonist in a national, postcolonial allegory and, paradoxically, a Maori god. There is, despite the novel’s idealism, an unresolved tension between the representation of Simon as Pakeha (and thus a whipping boy for European colonialism in New Zealand) and as Maui (and thus a figure for the postcolonial revivification of Maori mythology). I argue that any reconciliation between Maori and Pakeha is mitigated by the violence inflicted on Simon because he is white. Hulme exaggerates the paleness of the child; she uses Simon’s injuries to invoke disempowered and disadvantaged colonial whiteness. The violence the child suffers suggests that whiteness must be punished in order that Maoriness can regain pride of place in New Zealand. Maryanne Dever emphasizes Hulme’s use of language as a means of cultural resistance, suggesting that she uses Maori alongside English, and even within English, to undermine colonialist discourse. Dever writes that “language becomes a site of resistance and a way of decentring the narrative. The inclusion of the Maori subverts the conventionally unitary voice of command traditionally associated with the English language.”1 Thus, by “challenging the dominant Eurocentric vision of reality, the text offers an alternative voice, one that enfranchises multiplicity and undermines the authority of imperialism’s homogenising linguistic imperative”.2 However, Simon During implies that Hulme’s resistance may not “enfranchise multiplicity” so much as re-authenticate Maoriness and reestablish it as dominant in New Zealand: “The bone people [. . .] desires a postcolonial identity given to it in Maoriness. The heroine in rebuilding a marae, the hero, in guarding the remnants of the sacred ships of the The White Whipping Boy