Potiki and Home

Potiki follows a family in the Maori community of New Zealand. Patricia Grace spends a lot of time in the first half of the novel exploring the intricacies of the Maori culture how they are immensely connected to their land and how the land and culture inform each other.  
Roimata describes the shore and the feelings it holds for her as she returns back to her ancestral community and home after so much time spent away from it. She describes the beach she first arrives at first as colorless and as a place of death but, in the very next paragraph, she describes it as a place of hope, desires and dreams. She describes the magical and mythical quality of the beach where “feelings can shift with sand grains being sifted by the water and the wind” (Grace 18).  As soon as Roimata hears the sound of the community she grew up in through the funeral, she keeps repeating the phrase “twelve years have never been.” She hears the people and is on the land and it is as if all the time she spent away from them never happened. She feels at home. Her husband Hemi is very similar to Roimata in the trust in the land. She says about him “he being as rooted to the earth as a tree” (Grace 23). He has this never ending trust in the land and in their ancestors and that those two will provide everything him and his family could need. Even after losing his job he trusts that the land will provide for them for food and for a livelihood. 

With this great respect for the land comes a great respect for the human. In both accounts of Toko’s birth, one from the point of view of Roimata the other from the point of view of Toko. A great emphasis is placed on the search for Toko’s second skin. From these accounts of Toko’s birth the reader gets the sense that as a part of the birth the second skin represents the former self that the baby had before they entered the world in the form they now encompass. The Maori place great emphasis on the funeral as well as seen through Roimata’s description of the funeral of Hemi’s mother at her return to the community. 

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