Kisses in the Nederends and Silver Linings

Nathan Galloway
10/23/19
EN376 Dr. Ellis
Silver Linings in “Kisses in the Nederends”
            The driving force behind the plot of Epeli Hau’ofa’s book Kisses in the Nederendsis the pain and suffering that Oilei Bomboki experiences as a result of his multiple anal fistulas. Hau’ofa initially presents Oilei’s experiences as largely negative. However, by the conclusion of the story, Oilei has been transformed into a new man because of the trials he has gone through.  
            In the first half of the book, the experiences that Oilei has are harmful to both himself and his community. His farting and pain result in arguments between his wife and himself where he threatens her viciously. "I promise you, you dried up old bag, if anyone outside these walls hears of this, I'll wring your fucking neck four fucking times. Do you hear, me?" (Hau’ofa, 3) This and many other fights like this deteriorate Oilei and Makarita’s relationship. Each interaction Oilei has with his wife or other members of his community end up in negative consequences until he eventually hits Makarita. 
            This physical altercation is the first of its kind as Oilei recalls “Oilei had never before hit Makarita, that he knew. And he could not recall any time since his boxing days when Oilei had punched anyone else” (Hau’ofa, 75). From this point on Oilei’s experiences with his wife, community, and healers end up leading to positive consequences. He is very reflective of his violence against Makarita and has a change in attitude towards his illness. He is open to Bubul and Babu helping him with his issues as he knows (consciously or subconsciously) that this isn’t just affecting him, but his entire family/community. 
The book ends in happiness for Oilei and Makarita as they join the Third Millennium and come to terms with their previous ideas of beauty, love, and good vs bad. Oilei’s anal fissures end up serving as a learning experience for him because they end up bringing him internal peace which in turn brings him closer to his wife.
I have experienced this phenomenon of a truly negative and damaging experience turning into positive consequences. In 2014, my parents went through an ugly divorce. There was no affair or violence, but the fallout from the split was quite harmful to my brothers and I. The two sides of our family were driven apart and as a 13-year-old family was more or less the most important thing in my life at the time. My younger brother, who was nine years old at the time, and I were extremely dependent on our parents as role models and as the singular source of knowledge and comfort. At a time where I was in a very important part of my development as a young man, my parents split changed my outlook on life in a very big way. At first, I felt like I had been forsaken. How could I trust anyone or put my faith in any relationship if the one stable thing in my life (at the time) fell apart in front of my eyes? 
What saved me and is the silver lining of this story is my younger brother. As a thirteen-year-old, I had to mature extremely quickly so that I could fill the space of role model to my younger brother. My parents at the time were still very immature and confrontational with each other. To counter this and give my younger brother some sort of consistency in his life, I had to fill a role most young teenagers are not asked to fill. 
My parents split also led me to a new and improved school, many more friends, and a new family with my mother's fiancée. These life-altering experiences can either ruin a person and put them in a very dark or they can breathe new life into them. Not everything was peachy with Oilei or I' experiences. There was a lot of hardship and some very damaging events. However, because both Oilei and I had people that loved them deeply and wanted them to get better, the result of these events was personal growth. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spiral of Time in Potiki

Potiki is a story focusing on a Maori community fighting to maintain their autonomy from hungry land developers who are desperately trying to coerce the Maori people off of their sacred land. The author, Patricia Grace, constructs the story through a patchwork of memories, where different events, different times, and different viewpoints come together in like a mosaic.   Grace disrupts the linear narrative and describes time in a cyclical way, a never-ending spiral. Rather than segregating time the “past time” of the ancestors from the “present time” of the community, there is a new way of describing time. I found “now-time” to be a fascinating concept, where there’s this spiral temporality where past and future time are narratively experienced. The concept of “sacred time” was more challenging to understand, where the narrative of Christ and the and the ancient myth of Mäui align.   The spiral, like kowhaiwhai, signifies repetition with a difference. Toko shares q
Read more

Potiki literary analysis

In comparing  Things Fall Apart  and  Potiki,  it is evident that each culture, and even individuals within a culture, define home differently. Many of the characters in  Potiki  rely upon the geography of New Zealand to define home. Hemi particularly views home through this lens.              Hemi first demonstrates his commitment to the land when he loses his job. While he is initially disappointed, he quickly resolves that “He’d always known that one day he would return to the land, and that the land would support them all again," (60). He trusts that the land will provide for his family, which is exceptional given that he has recently become unemployed. Additionally, Hemi expresses the importance of protecting his own land. He reflects, “These days people were looking more to their land” because “They had to if they didn’t want to be wiped off the face of the earth,” (60). He then points to the Te Ope people as an example of those who had been forced to protect their land. 
Read more

Potiki Reading

          From the beginning of her novel, Patricia Grace makes her priorities clear: She will be telling the stories that have been untold, and more importantly, unheard. Potiki  begins with the story of the carver, a master storyteller, who places the history of his people in his craft. Like Grace, he is "Seeking out and exposing the figures that were hidden" (7). However, his final story is left uncompleted, because "[It] is not yet known" (10). With the death of the carver, the narrative begins, and the reader is thrown into a somewhat tumultuous world.           Unlike Things Fall Apart , there is a strong emphasis on the "hidden" nature of the story. Roimata's internal conflict is not nearly as clear as Okonkwo's. In fact, it feels almost unknowable. "As a child I lived with my father in a railway house with a small, dark kitchen... Our window framed the flying windows, flying eyes, of trains which riveted the senses, carrying them into
Read more