Potiki Reading

Potiki by Patricia Grace is a novel rooted in a group of indigenous people who have a strong love and faith for cultural traditions, connections to ancestry, and their homeland. As I read the first half of the book I chose explore a question similar to what we discussed in Things Fall Apartand in general relation to what constitutes as home. With the question of “is a home a physical place or a state of mind” running through my thoughts I picked up on key details within the first few chapters that started to shape the answer to this question.
            Within the first chapter, Roimata describes the land in which she lives. She emphasizes the connection her people have to the land and the sea; and the cultural traditions that lie behind these physical land marks. Roimata often tells of important events that have occurred in her life, and relates them to land through description. The idea of Earth plays a large part in many of her memories, one of the first for example when she speaks of the birth of her son James. She states, “his cries caused no earth tremble or sky rumble, no ripple on the midnight hour” (15). Memories like this and of her culture are so deeply intertwined to the earth. The idea that land, ocean and buildings are so important to the Maori community resonates with the idea that home can be include a physical attachment to a place, however it is the concepts that surround that physical place that make it hold the weight that it does. 
            As the novel approaches the idea of colonization of the Moari people, the question of home resonates even more so. The details of deep embedded traditions start to define this novel as conceptualizing home as a combination of the people’s culture, way of life and physical place. For Roimata, it seems as if her loved ones are the center of this, and they connect directly to the land for even the time she spent away as a young girl, her relationship to her home only grew stronger. 

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