Kapiolani Community College
Horizons 2001

A Life Beyond the Sea
by Carrie Shklov

The author uses the voices of Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe and Maori writer Patricia Grace in this fictional exchange. Oe, enraptured by the Maori culture after reading Grace’s Potiki, starts a correspondence with her, but via a letter to Roimata, a character in the story. Oe is inspired by the intrinsic value of land that encourages family and community values. Grace, fascinated by the role-play, responds in Roimata’s voice with exuberance. Oe was named Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1994. His writing explores how individuals, confronted with tragedies, overcome humiliation and other trials to move on with dignity. In “A Personal Matter,” he wrote about his son, who was born with a brain injury. Grace has also won numerous awards. Potiki, published by University of Hawai’i Press, was the winner of the New Zealand Fiction Award in 1987.

-Editor's Note

Dearest Roimata,
I stumbled upon the Maori lifestyle and I am completely fascinated with its earthly, luxurious pleasures. From the ashes of the land a family is fed, from the land a generation is built and many memories are left behind. These memories are swept away by the sea, a cleansing of the land so that new memories can be made. But before the gray sea takes these memories, they are made into stories. It is these stories that educate the Maori people. So from the sea and the land, all that is alive lives for an eternity. Where there is a sea and land there will always be stories for the Maori people.

You once wrote so eloquently:
It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a NOW-time, centered in the being. It was a new realisation that the center being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named “past” and “future” only for our convenience. The being reaches out to grasp those adornments that become part of the self .... (39).

Carved into wood is the story of the ancestors who have birthed a new generation of Maori people. These ancestors are not forgotten because who they are who you are. You teach this to your children and they teach their children. Through the preservation of the land, self-identity and cultural identity is also preserved. Ancestors don’t die and fade away, only to be remembered in withered photo albums. Their spirit and knowledge live through the womb of trees that are carved into poupou. This is the secret that the modern culture of developed countries such as Japan and the United States have forgotten. With the loss of ancestral veneration, modern society has to search through the rubble of concrete and electrical impulses to find its heart Ñ its soul.

From the ashes modern man struggles to survive in the fog of carbon monoxide. The pulse of the city is electrical and man-made. Blazing neon lights set the thruway on fire and many are crammed into living vestibules. His image is duplicated, as he is mass-produced in a government assembly line like paper dolls, flimsy with no backbone. He is expected to live like the majority with so called “ethics.” Of course the majority, which is usually the educated class, defines “ethics.” Education begins in concrete buildings with many books. Teachers speak to pupils about history from one cultural perspective, usually not shared by the ethnic perspective. There is much pressure to succeed, as the young dream of prosperity that grows in bank accounts. As the city grows more pavement and metal arches, the land becomes scarce. Trees are dying, lacking the luster of the womb enriched by the mahogany of its sticky sap. The sea is becoming polluted with too many hands that take and do not replenish. The Dollarman has already arrived like a disease that kills. In this case, the modern population calls it technology for advancement.

Patient Watcher of the Skies, I too have birthed a son with a certain“crookedness.” My son was born with a protruding brain. He looked like he had two heads; many called him a monster. I wrote a novel describing my experience with trying to conform to Japanese society. In this novel, the character Bird is encouraged to let his son die. The doctor with years of medical training even advised Bird how to sabotage his son’s health. But your son, Toko, was thought to be a gift, despite his “crookedness.” Your people cared for him and treated him with the best of care. He was thought to be the Potiki, a Demi-God. You, his mother, knew that he was a gift that would be taken away, but his presence would last for as long as there was land and sea. Toko knew he was a gift; while he was alive he had a special knowing:

And what I have known ever since then is that my knowing, my own knowingness, is different. It is a before, and a now, and an after knowing, and not like the knowing that other people have. It is a now knowing as if everything is now. My mother Roimata knows about me. On that night she said to me, “You knew didn’t you, Toko? You knew” (52).

Where did Toko come from? He was birthed through Mary, but who was his father? Joseph Williams was blamed for the impregnation, but the prologue suggests a lonely carver as the maker of Toko. Everything about Toko is a mystery: his “crookedness” and his knowingness. He just appeared to come from the sea. The people of the village accepted him as he was. There was some anger and confusion, but then they accepted him as the gift that he was.

Oh, Patient Watcher of the Skies, how could you watch while the machines came from the hills to take away the loved ones of yesterday? How could you sit as still as a rock while you knew Toko would die soon. I, like Tangimoana, do not understand the passivity you had chosen to take. I weep for your loss, Yet I realize that you see something that I do not see, just what is it?

Kenzaburo

My father Hemi said that the land and sea was our whole life, the means by which we survived and stayed together. ’Our whanau is the land and sea. Destroy the land and sea, we destroy ourselves (99).

Tangimoana was not the only one who cried for the death of Toko. It wasn’t even the death of Toko that was so hurtful, but the way that he died. “The manner of his death, that is where the pain is Ñ the manner of his death, and the brokenness and suffering of the little bird” (159). It is like I said, the stories will come as long as there is land and sea. I will teach the young the lesson of The Dollarman coming. They will have to choose what is right for them. There is no need to resist, when destiny finds its way regardless of what we do. Not every story will have a happy ending. Sometimes the stories have darkness to them. But it matters that we tell about that darkness.

’Light is a gift too,’ she said, ’A gift of the sky, which is something that the earth knows. But the dark, the dark is a gift also because in the dark there is nurturing. These things are known to the earth as well as the sky (174).

I know where I stand. I have always known, and yes, I appear as still as a rock that will not change. The metamorphosis of stories will keep coming, as I am willing to share. I do not know what is in store for my family or my people of Maori blood, but I know where I stand. If my story seems to ask the answers that you seek, it is because there are no real answers. There are many answers as you can tell. Each person had a different answer when the story changed. Maori culture is mysterious because we take from all perspective to put it into one. It is like the sea, the ebb and flow of the tide that brings new shells to color the sands. Or like the land that produces a new crop every season. Life is constantly changing like our stories.

Roimata