Review by New York Times Review
IN June 1942, a United States naval convoy arrived in New Zealand, beginning a friendly invasion that would last two years and involve around 100,000 American soldiers and sailors. To help the visitors adapt, the New Zealand government published a booklet that made a useful point: "New Zealanders have been well trained by your movies," it said, "so we cotton (catch) on to most of your ordinary slang. But as we don't export films to Hollywood you won't know ours." That one-way flow of American culture has only gained momentum since then, which is why Christina Thompson's account of her own first visit to New Zealand strikes a jarring note. It's sometime in the 1980s, and Thompson has stopped off on her way from Boston, her hometown, to graduate school in Australia. In a pub north of Auckland she meets a group of Maoris - New Zealand's indigenous Polynesians - having a beer after a day out diving for crayfish. "I have often thought of that night as a contact encounter," she writes in "Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All," explaining that "'contact' is what we call it when two previously unacquainted groups meet for the very first time." Thompson persists with this meeting-of-alien-peoples theme as the tenuous link between the memoir part of her book, in which she is cast as a kind of explorer charting new cross-cultural territory in her relationship with a Maori ("I was small and blond, he was a 6-foot-2, 200-pound Polynesian. I had a Ph.D., he went to trade school"), and the history part (the European discovery and colonization of New Zealand). The late-20th-century pub incident, for example, segues into accounts of 18th-century encounters between Maoris and explorers like James Cook and Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne. Both of them were ultimately killed by the Polynesians they met; Thompson married hers. Later, the story of Omai, the first Polynesian to set foot in England, is woven into an account of Thompson's return home with her new husband, "for many people in Boston ... the first person they had ever met of his kind." In 1770s London, Omai was a hit - with one young lady asserting that "he is so polite, attentive & easy, that you would have thought he came from some foreign court." In modern-day Boston, Thompson's husband, known as Seven, attracted "a similar sort of admiration," something she found surprising. "He, after all, had little idea how things were done among people like my parents and could no more have been expected to know what passed for good manners among them than they would have known the protocol for being invited onto a Ngati Rehia marae." Really? I can see how middle-class Bostonians might not be steeped in the etiquette of the Maori meeting place, but there's been nowhere to hide from all things American - even in New Zealand - for quite a few decades now. The Maori chief Toot in his costume as a chieftain, circa 1818. From the Missionary Papers. We don't learn here of Omai's fate, though in her fine account of Captain Cook's voyages ("The Trial of the Cannibal Dog"), Anne Salmond rounds off his remarkable tale. After two years entertaining scientists and society ladies, Omai joined Cook's final South Pacific journey, eventually making it back to his home near Tahiti. There, he was set up with a house, a garden and a collection of animals including horses, sheep, turkeys, cats and a monkey. A few years later, though, Omai succumbed to a fever, all but one of his animals also having died, even the monkey, which was killed falling out of a coconut palm. As for Seven, at book's end he is still in Massachusetts, where the family settled and Thompson works as editor of Harvard Review. She wonders sometimes if he gets homesick. "'Don't you want to go back to New Zealand?' I would ask him. 'Not really,' he always said." Although Thompson's "contact encounter" parallels are strained, her observations about the enduring effects of colonization can be penetrating. She puts her vantage point of insider-outsider (she's never lived in New Zealand yet has an intimate connection with it) to good effect, tracing the genealogy of racial stereotypes and cutting through some of New Zealand's most cherished myths about itself. Like the one about how injustices of the past have been addressed, or that, unlike Australia, New Zealand is not racist. "What, after all, does the cluster of social indicators that includes low life expectancy, poor health, high unemployment and low levels of educational attainment suggest, if not poverty?" she asks. "And what is the root cause of Maori poverty, if not colonization?" Thompson now has interests on both sides of the postcolonial divide, feeling the dispossession suffered by her husband's (hence her children's) people as well as that perpetrated by her own. ("It was the Dakotas and Pennacooks and Pawtuckets who paid the price of our family's prosperity.") A difficulty with explorer stories, however, is that the voice of the explored is usually missing, and this is certainly the case here. Thompson explains it as a deliberate decision, a "gesture of respect." "It is not their story I am telling," she says of Seven's family, "it is mine." Actually, it is both - it's her story about herself and her story about them. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, lives in New Zealand.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
