The Whale Rider: negotiating the customary, the modern and gender change
As a child, I always sought out a single lonely shelf in my local area’s libraries. The 398.2 ‘folk tales and fairy tales’ section of the Dewey Decimal System was my nirvana. I would always quickly and greedily exhaust that shelf’s often-beautifully illustrated offerings and long for a fresh shelf at a new library.
I don’t know exactly why my young self was attracted to these romantic, often brutal, always evocative myths and legends from other places, cultures and times. I was a shy, sheltered, Anglo, middle-class, outer-suburbs kid. From an early age I was a big reader, always happy to skip Phys Ed classes to be left alone with a book. And these stories of other cultures were my ultimate escape. Perhaps I longed for difference and adventure, sought an expansion of my limited horizons. I think those stories, underpinned by another kind of temporality and ageless poetics, also spoke to the place of great stillness and universal connection and continuity within.
Funny how some things change and some things just don’t. Now thirty years old, my books of choice continue to be deeply cultural: multicultural / postcolonial / ethnographic / world literature, ethnographies and anthropology. I continue to be preoccupied and fascinated with what makes us different and what allows us to forge connection and empathy across difference. My own writing and the contours of my life reflect these themes, too. I didn’t imagine as a little kid that I would have spent years in Timor-Leste doing research and fieldwork, learnt another language, met a man from Uganda. But looking back, I guess it all makes sense!
The Whale Rider
The 2002 film Whale Rider is perhaps better known than its 1987 novel antedent, The Whale Rider, by Maori author Witi Ihimaera. I myself admit to being introduced to the novel through the gorgeous movie.
Moving seamlessly between human and whales’ points of view, The Whale Rider tells of a grandfather’s quest to save his culture and history by searching for a new male leader within his clan, a young girl’s struggle to be embraced as the new leader by her grandfather, and a restless ancient bull whale’s desire for the restoration of balance and connection between his world and the human world.
In various interviews, including most recently in a fascinating discussion with Harriett Gilbert and the BBC World Book, Ihimaera credits a rare event in 1985 with sparking the genesis of The Whale Rider. At the time, Ihimaera was living and working in New York. His apartment overlooked the Hudson River. One day, quite extraordinarily, a whale came up the river and Ihimaera saw it spouting. In the BBC interview, the author says that no matter where he is in the world, he lives in a “Maori universe”; that his worldview remains deeply rooted to his ancestral beliefs. For Ihimaera’s people, their origin mythology (as in the novel and the film) holds that their original ancestor was brought to the land of Whangara on the East Coast of New Zealand by a whale. From this perspective, he was convinced that the whale had come looking for him, to give Ihimaera a message. He then wrote a draft of the novel in three short weeks.
Audience and craft
My idea of the perfect literary gem,The Whale Rider has often been promoted as a young adult or children’s book, which initially surprised me. But I guess thinking back on my younger self, I can imagine I would have found the book captivating for all the reasons that led me to the 398.2 section of my local library. (As an aside, I stumbled across a reference to The Whale Rider being part of the Kenyan educational syllabus, which completely delights me.) And the story structure is quite simple and accessible, essentially a traditional three-part plot with a setting, character and goal set-up, a conflict and crisis for our young hero, and a resolution. Ihimaera also does well to give the novel a contemporary feel and avoid the possible pitfall of over-earnestness with gentle humour and some endearing characters.
But to package The Whale Rider solely as YA fiction would absolutely be to diminish this incredible work. The prose is tight and exquisite, and the description fresh and evocative. Take the opening two paragraphs from the prologue, for example:
In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning. The mountains were like a stairway to heaven, and the lush green rainforest was a rippling cloak of many colours. The sky was iridescent, swirling with the patterns of wind and clouds; sometimes it reflected the prisms of rainbow or southern aurora. The sea was ever-changing, shimmering and seamless to the sky. This was the well at the bottom of the world and when you looked into it you felt you could see to the end of forever.
This is not to say that the land and sea were without life, without vivacity. The tuatara, the ancient lizand with its third eye, was sentinel here, unblinking in the hot sun, watching and waiting to the east. The moa browsed in giant wingless herds across the southern island. Within the warm stomach of the rainforests, kiwi, weka and the other birds foraged for huhu and similar succulent insects. The forests were loud with the clatter of tree bark, chatter of cicada and murmur of fish-laden streams. Sometimes the forest grew suddenly quiet and in wet bush could be heard the filigree of fairy laughter like a sparkling glissando.
Moreover, Ihimaera does not shy away from giving the work some hard edges and confronting scenes highlighting both the sensitivities and traumas of race politics in the contemporary everyday, and the growing disjuncture between the human and natural worlds.
Key themes
The novel’s themes also have layers and nuance to them that I think also lend themselves to adult readers. The Whale Rider encompasses all my favourite lifelong thematic fascinations: the tensions between customary culture and the modern condition; mythology and origin stories; the connection between the human and natural worlds (I especially love underwater worlds, and what Ihimaera does with that in the whales becoming real characters with love for humans is spellbinding); post-colonial race and indigenous politics in the Pacific; gender, tradition and change.
The Hudson River whale was not the only impetus for the story. Ihimaera’s people’s mythology becomes the heart of the fictional story, but the context of contemporary New Zealand and the Pacific is not romanticised. Ihimaera was also stewing over the contemporary conditions and political struggles facing the Maori peoples of New Zealand, what shape a new generation of leaders may take, and generational loss of culture.
The Whale Rider is thus a thought-provoking riff on the difficulties of negotiating the often-painful but also productive tensions between the customary and the modern, particularly in the liminality of an intergenerational space. I was struck recently by the great similarities in story and theme between The Whale Rider and my all-time favourite film, Himalaya. The stunning Himalaya, set in Nepal, also shows a dedicated, loving and precocious grandchild (in this instance male) of a clan elder learning to navigate the customary and the modern to build a new form of leadership.
Image courtesy of Kino International
Gender
Gendered power is also one of The Whale Rider’s key themes, and this is a key point of departure from similar stories set in other contemporary contexts, such as Himalaya. The father of daughters, Ihimaera wanted to gift his girls empowering faith in and recognition of their leadership capabilities, and fully accepts that that the novel is feminist in its politics. Hence the novel’s protagonist is a young girl, Kahu (named Pai in the film adaptation), who in a clan where leadership is passed on through patrilineal descent, quietly but stubbornly battles for her grandfather’s acceptance as the next rightful leader. The grandfather, Koro Apirana, is desperately looking for the next leader amongst the group’s young men before their customary culture is lost forever. However, it is only Kahu who has not only the real desire to carry her grandfather’s culture forward, but also the innate connection with oceanic world of their ancestors and Paikea’s old friend, the ancient bull whale. For Kahu, this is not just an intellectual or political exercise of regenerating indigenous culture. Ihimaera suggests that she has been granted the special ancestral gift of leadership.
This was a controversial step of Ihimaera’s, to change the mythology in such a way as to allow a space for females that hasn’t been there traditionally, and he received criticism for it within New Zealand. But it is also undoubtedly one of the novel’s greatest selling points and universal themes.
From my own anthropological studies of contemporary Timor-Leste, I am always keenly interested in how gender is both negotiated in the everyday context of multiple ways of being-in-the-world, and how gender is treated in cross-cultural works. Too often when gender is discussed, customary culture is cast as altogether backwardly patriarchal, and the modern becomes a feminist benchmark to which non-Western cultures should strive towards. There is little allowance for either any grey areas in this picture, or the reality that most of the world simultaneous inhabits and negotiates both customary and modern sense of being-in-the-world.
I think Ihimaera approaches with subtlety the tensions and questions regarding the change and challenges inherent in pursuing gender equality and the need to respect and maintain the ancestors’ ways. I was relieved to see that both the customary and the modern, and importantly their interaction, was revealed in all its complexity, including in terms of gender. While the people of Whangara are of patrilineal lineage, and therefore men traditionally have political and leadership power, Ihimaera also reveals how Nanny Flowers’ ancestral lineage has strong female figures who challenged male-dominated power from within the bounds of customary culture. Nanny Flowers herself is a quiet advocate for Kahu’s challenging of her grandfather’s blindness to the potential in female leadership. Moreover, the ‘modern world’ is also not shown to be a utopia of equality as the primary narrator, Kahu’s uncle, comes up against shocking racism from white Australians in his travels in Papua New Guinea.
Something I have thought long and hard about in terms of the novel’s gender politics, though, is the fact that Kahu, while a girl, still emerged as a leader from within a patrimonial system. She is the child of the leader. That is, leadership as a right is still only really accessible to this particular family by way of familial inheritance. In this way, Ihimaera allows both continuity with and reclamation of customary culture, as well as for cultural adaptation.
But the extent to which this is a transformation of gender and broader social relations remains unknown. Could a girl or a woman from beyond this lineage become a leader, and what would this mean for that delicate balance between continuity and change, the customary and the modern? If Kahu only gave birth to a boy or boys, would leadership revert to males? Does Kahu’s leadership represent the start of a real challenge to the system of male-inherited patrimonial succession, or just an anomaly able to be incorporated within the system? I suppose the fact that the grandfather Koro was looking beyond his first born suggests that leadership from beyond the usual bloodline may be eventually allowed in a process of change, but whether that mode of leadership can forge that all-important connection with the ancestral world is untested. In addition, we don’t know exactly what will Kahu do with her leadership. Will she be particularly concerned with women’s empowerment and others’ gender struggles?
I would dearly love to know what happens in Kahu’s adulthood and the clan’s next generation. Please, Witi?
I guess I’ll just have to imagine all the rich possibilities and struggles that lie ahead for Kahu, her clan and its women. That’s not such a bad thing at all.
