The homeland and the city: Rural and urban decolonization in Patricia Grace’s Potiki

Abstract

Over the last decade, studies from multiple academic disciplines have started to examine the city’s role as a place of decolonization for Māori people in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article uses those multidisciplinary findings as a basis for literary criticism by re-examining the role of the city in Patricia Grace’s second novel Potiki (1986). Indigenous urbanites are generally deemed impossible and ‘unnatural’ within the inherited colonial ideology. And even though the novel foregrounds a Māori family’s return to their ancestral land, this article argues that the very success of this return is based on the interrelation between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ strategies of decolonization. While the colonial urban–rural binary often seems reinforced, the novel inverts the power positions between colonizer and colonized, thereby promoting decolonization. At the same time, some characters become unconsciously entrapped in a romanticized pre-migration idyll, which the harsh reality of agricultural working life cannot satisfy. In order to assess the effectiveness of the different decolonizing strategies employed by the characters, my analysis utilizes the postcolonial key concepts of binary opposition, the liminal, the interstice, ambivalence, double consciousness and cultural appropriation, and examines the degree to which inherited binary oppositions are either maintained or defied by Pākehā and Māori within the novel.