Manoa, vol. 9, no. 1 (1997): Homeland

This issue is available online via JSTOR.

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Homeland: New writing from Aotearoa/New Zealand

Guest-edited by Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan

In his five-volume anthology of Maori literature, Te Ao Marama, Witi Ihimaera calls the 1990s the flowering of literature written by Maori people. “We may have come to a crossroads,” he writes, “of a literature of a past and a literature of a present and future.” MANOA is pleased to showcase some of the work from this new flowering in Homeland. The writing published here was gathered by guest editors Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan, and includes some of New Zealand’s best-known Maori authors Patricia Grace, Hone Tuwhare, Alan Duff, and Ihimaera—as well as emerging and less well known writers. Each of the pieces is an energetic exploration of homeland. Perceptions of home are also explored in essays by Susan Vreeland and David Tager, and in a symposium titled “Intimate Dwellings.” Other works in this collection include two previously untranslated stories by Nobel Prize author Yasunari Kawabata; an interview with Hugh Moorhead on his fifty-year search for the meaning of life; and, as always, outstanding North American fiction, poetry, and reviews. The art portfolio consists of photography by Hawai‘i artists Anne Kapulani Landgraf and Mark Hamasaki, known collectively as Piliamo‘o. Their work documents the restoration of the streams in Waiahole Valley on the island of O‘ahu. This too is an expression of homeland.