“The past does not lie behind us”: Warrior-matriarchs’ retrotopia in Witi Ihimaera’s fiction

Abstract

Contrary to an apolitical, pessimistic, and non-feminist perception of Witi Ihimaera’s work, this article contends that his early novel The Matriarch (1986) and its sequel The Dream Swimmer (1997) frame Māori communities as an ancient, patriarchal space in need of revision to accommodate women. Reconsidering the role of tribalism and Māori utopian and cyclical land narratives, this study argues that the confessional male narrator of both novels, Tamatea Mahana, learns to embrace a matrilineal genealogy not only of powerful Māori women leaders of chiefly status, but also of charismatic women in the shadow, like his mother Tiana. Beyond Pākehā imperial democracy and Māori “male utopias of domination”, Tamatea and the exceptional gallery of warrior-matriarchs implement a peculiar and controversial retrotopia — a return to the prematurely buried grand ideas of the past — which, even when dangerously resonating with nostalgia, aims at an open-ended model of democracy through spiral temporality.1 A predominantly decolonizing theory and methodology is used, drawing on Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wāhine theories.