Postcolonial Homelands

Matt Kozak Sons for the Return (Part 3) What I found most interesting about Sons of the Return was the way Wendt shows how the colonized resist oppression in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Specifically, I found the boy’s masculinity to be quite important in his countering of his own marginalization. As I read the first several chapters I continually thought of the boy as “the perfect man.” Of course, masculinity is tricky to define because the concept varies between groups and changes within different contexts. Nevertheless, this was my first impression. The boy’s stoicism and detachment allow him to manage his position in a racist society. It seems that he is in total control of his situation. “Do you want me to win the game for them?” (Wendt 4) he asks, while playing rugby. It’s not a question of if he can, but if he should. Of course, this sense of masculinity becomes complicated as the reader sees the boy is not all confidence. He shows insecurity, especially with the girl....

This past week was my first time tutoring at Bridges for service learning. When I arrived, I received an orientation from Kevin in which he briefly described the “homeland” of the students I would be working with. Kevin was intentional about highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of the community the students lived in around York Road. He explained that he was passionate about offering an enriching afterschool program because the majority of the Baltimore City Schools offer few or no extracurricular activities. He mentioned the schools’ lack of resources as well, including the fact that students at Baltimore City Schools usually lack access to safe drinking water from the water fountains. After identifying these challenges, he went on to describe the children I would be tutoring. They were dedicated students who had supportive parents and members of the Bridges staff encouraging them to graduate from high school and pursue a post-secondary education.     ...

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 t...

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...

The first thing to notice about the writing style of this novel is the third person, omniscient perspective that the narrator has. Similar to in “Things Fall Apart,” the narrator is knowledgeable of the characters and their innermost thoughts. And just the same, the narrator does not take a historical voice when describing the events and characters. That is, the narrator does not explain what is happening around the world. The narrator, instead, fully understands the inner workings of the community of focus, yet does not expand beyond that. This allows the reader to understand the society and characters more fully while creating an atmosphere where we share some of the same unknowingness and isolation that this Maori tribe feels, just the same as the tribe Okonkwo was in felt.               Along with this, relating to the class reading before this one, the use of “colonial language” does not exist within the text. The...

Baltimore-- often dubbed a city of refuge as much as it has been named a city of violence--may be segregated still, but in some ways it bestoys a resilient community just as much as found in Potiki’s Maori community. Still, one wonders why this dual identity originated? The secret lies within the answer of who feels consistently apart and supported by the community. Indeed, the strength and love must be shown as much in times of non-crisis as much as moments to affirm unity. The reverse, of course, suggests true commitment, but the consistency of supporting growth in the latter moments as much as the former get people to make it to the tough moments, affirming a purpose and existence not just in times of strife but in smaller moments that are remembered with fondness. In the past four years the growth of the Baltimore 365 movement outside of just responding to mass gun violence has served to connect the community into a “home” that its people can rely on for more than just merely sur...

The explanation and exposition of life in New Zealand manifests itself in the first person. As opposed to Achebe’s novel which utilizes the language of the third person, Potiki’s first person point of view gives the novel a lived-through feeling as compared to the have-lived depiction presented by Things Fall Apart . Roimata especially, being the protagonist, seems to be capable of defining and contextualizing herself in familiar terms, geographical terms, as contrasted by the tribal and cultural relevancy the characters in Achebe’s book strived to attain. Roimata’s sense of belonging is very much tied to the land and how it makes her, and her family feel and behave. She describes herself and her family in terms of their environment and its impact on their behavior. Nature and the New Zealand landscape is very much a plot device, not merely a background. The geography of the novel impacts the characters emotionally and prompts multiple responses that distinguishes the characters from ...