Writing Along Broken Lines

Book excerpt: Covering the two decades from 1972, Swiss scholar Otto Heim presents detailed readings of the novels and short fiction by Heretaunga Pat Baker, Alan Duff, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Bruce Stewart, J. C. Sturm, Apirana Taylor, and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. His book places the fiction by Maori writers in the context of a culture of survival and traces its textual engagement with violence between empathy and sacrifice, from the privacy of domestic violence to the public arenas of systemic violence and war. He argues that out of this confrontation with violence emerges a distinctive ethnic world view created by the construction of individual experience, the development of an ideological stance and the expression of a spiritual orientation. Heim's analysis shows works of fiction by contemporary Maori writers as challenging explorations of the constraints placed on the literary imagination by the urgent facts of the human condition and the imperatives of culture.