Mismatching  Perspectives and Pacific Transculturality


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Mismatching  Perspectives and Pacific Transculturality 

 

 
Anne Holden Rønning 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract: Increased critical consciousness and awareness of interculturality in a global 

and glocal context at the beginning of the twenty-first century has increasingly used the 

concept of transculturation when discussing modernities. Politically transculturation can 

be used to describe processes of negotiation in contemporary society that lead to social 

awareness and solidarity, as well as ensuring the continuity of societies. The fusing of 

cultural forms leads to a mismatching of perspectives, hence some critics have preferred 

to use the terms translation and/or transliteracy to describe this concept. 

Transculturation is related to the “normal processes of artistic borrowing and influence, 

by which any culture makes part of its contribution to the conversation of mankind,” as 

Les Murray maintained, and “it engages multiple lines of difference simultaneously” 

with overlapping boundaries (Rogers 491). Referring to various authors and linking it to 

cultural appropriation and border crossings, this article examines how the narrative 

expression of Both Sides of the Moon, to cite the title of Alan Duff’s book, is a key 

feature of Pacific writing, in an area where centuries of migration from near and far 

have exposed different cultures to each other on social, political, linguistic and aesthetic 

levels. These ‘contact zones’, to use Mary Pratt’s words, provide the reader with 

constantly moving translated identities, cultural hybridity and a use of language that has 

a highly local significance in a global context. 

 

Key words: transculturation, perspective, Pacific area. 

 

 

Transculturation both as a theoretical term and as an aesthetic concept is increasingly 

used to describe and discuss the complexity of the globalised world in which we live. 

The mix of cultural identities which ensues from increased mobility, past and present 

emigration and immigration, as well as the acknowledgment of diasporas, poses 

questions as to what really are the identities of groups and nations. The Pacific area is 

particularly suitable for such an investigation since it has a variety of different ethnic 

groups, both indigenous and settler communities. Unlike the US where the melting pot 

has been symbolic of national allegiance, or the mosaic of Canada indicating 

multiculturalism, the Pacific has not been labelled in terms of identities. As Bill 

Copyright©2013 Anne Holden Rønning. This text may be 

archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard 

copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited 

and no fee is charged. 



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Ashcroft has written there is a ‘strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, 

history, and nation that needs to be unravelled’ (2009a). This article will try and unravel 

some of these issues in relation to the Pacific area. 

 

First a few words on what we mean by the concept of transculturation as a literary and 

global phenomenon. By looking at texts through transcultural eyes, or gazing at them in 

this way, we add a new dimension not only to the text itself as signifying worlds of 

subtext, but also enhance people’s understanding of global and glocal world views.
i
 

Transculturation in literature does not necessarily evolve from colonial dominance of 

another language, but rather from literary processes and genres adapted to a new 

landscape and way of life. After all we define ourselves through language and the 

creation of sub-cultural fields. And, when we do so, we can ask whether the interference 

of the very form of the text may affect our view. Literary criticism in the latter half of 

the twentieth century has laid great emphasis on this literary borrowing, and there is an 

increasing debate as to the transcultural nature of it. In many ways T.S.Eliot summed 

this up when he wrote of the writer in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: 

 

He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a 

mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own 

private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a 

development which abandons nothing en route, which does not 

superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the 

Magdalenian draughtsmen. (1953, 16 emphasis in the original) 

 

Though thinking within a European context Eliot’s words are equally applicable today 

in our global world. Eliot speaks of the poet’s mind as being a catalyst for emotions and 

feelings, for “storing up numberless phrases, images, which remain there until all the 

particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (1953, 16). 

 

The search for a suitable term to express this age has evoked various responses. As I 

have written of this elsewhere I shall not go into a detailed discussion of 

transculturation here, but refer the reader to my article in Transnational Literature 

(2011). However, it is appropriate to mention some of the terms used. Petra Rüdiger and 

Konrad Gross (2009) prefer the term ‘translation’ as more suited to express the 

processes which take place in transculturation. The problem with the use of this term is 

that translation does not allow for border-crossings in the same manner as 

transculturation, which is related to the “normal processes of artistic borrowing and 

influence, by which any culture makes part of its contribution to the conversation of 

mankind,” as Les Murray maintained (1984, 4) and “engages multiple lines of 

difference simultaneously” with overlapping boundaries (Rogers 491). In an article 

entitled “Transculturation, transliteracy and generative art” Simon Biggs (2008) 

discusses Sue Thomas’s term ‘transliteracy’ in relation to text and media, and Ashcroft 

writing of the role of literature in expressing transculturation uses the term ‘transnation’ 

which he sees as “the fluid, migrating, outside of the state (conceptually and culturally 

as well as geographically) that begins within the nation” using India as his example 

(2009a). To Ashcroft “[t]he transnation (…) represents the utopian idea that national 

borders may not in the end need to be the authoritarian constructs of identity that they 

have become” (2009a). That is, the constant two-way interventions, a characteristic 

feature of transculturation, are non-static and undermine the authoritative power of the 



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colonial and postcolonial. This view is also supported by Rogers who, using Navajo 

weaving as his example, emphasizes “the influential role of (…) forms of power while 

also recognizing how cultural appropriation can be constitutive of cultural particularity 

and agency” (495). Literature can express the dynamics of this interaction and the 

changing pattern of cultures linguistically and aesthetically. In a way Homi Bhabha 

sums this up in “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan” when he writes that “[a]mbivalence 

and antagonism accompanies any act of cultural translation, because negotiating with 

the ‘difference of the other’ reveals the radical insufficiency of sedimented, settled 

systems of meaning and signification” (2000: 141). 

 

All these concepts provide tools for analysis, not just of literature, but also of cultural 

and social aspects of contemporary life, and common to all is the feature of border-

crossings, back and forth, a constant mediation. Texts of this kind are not looking back 

or answering as in much postcolonial writing, but rather expressing the complex nature 

of the globalized subject, the complexity of life for the individual, and are expressive of 

the inevitable influence of the many facets of life today. But often such fusing of 

cultural forms leads to a mismatching of perspectives. By this I mean the ambiguous 

duality of seeing and being seen at the same time, according to who is reading or 

viewing, and who is critiquing. Due to their lack of authoritarianism, the mismatching 

of perspectives in such texts is emancipatory since they subvert the colonial and the 

postcolonial, not necessarily indicating a transformation into something new, but rather 

an acknowledgment of the ambiguity of Bhabha’s Third Space. Textual spaces become 

thus woven meeting places rather than points of clash, and critiquing mismatching 

perspectives can contribute to an understanding of the identities portrayed. 

 

One can hardly write of transculturation without mentioning Mary Louise Pratt and her 

discussion of transculturation as a term used by ethnographers “to describe how 

subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from material transmitted to them by 

a dominant or metropolitan culture” (6), that is the selections made from the dominant 

culture are adjusted to suit the recipient’s purpose. Settler literature and society is a 

prime example of this – some retaining more of the ‘mother’ country’s ideals and 

values, others absorbing new cultures through what David Atwell describes as “multiple 

processes, a dialogue in both directions and, most importantly, processes of cultural 

destruction followed by reconstruction on entirely new terms” (18). Such 

reconstructions may be hybrid, but are often ambiguously so. The ‘contact zones’ may 

be in theme or language, using the dominant culture’s language to portray cultural 

identities and phenomena which provide the reader with constantly changing translated 

identities. Pratt uses the term ‘contact zones’ to examine how “metropolitan modes of 

representation [are] received and appropriated on the periphery” (6). She comments on 

how even what we understand as European culture is in part founded on the ‘other’, 

hence Spivak’s subaltern may have more power than we realise. Pratt defends her use of 

the term ‘contact’ from a linguistic point of view as that is the point where the 

trajectories of peoples, otherwise separated, now intersect (6-7). To her the “‘contact’ 

perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each 

other (…) in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, 

often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (7). This perspective can be 

harmonious but also mismatching depending on the origins of the various cultures, 

since contact zones are benchmarks and references against which we read or 

understand.  



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Settler literature, especially in Australia and Aotearoa, is an interesting example for 

studying these zones and their translated identities, for three major reasons. First both 

areas have indigenous populations, though their status has been very different 

historically. Secondly, immigration brought a constant interchange of cultures, but also 

isolationism – the Southern hemisphere – the finality of early settlement, and in some 

cases resistance to change. And third, the necessity for immigrants to adjust their 

original cultural belonging to another topographical and climatic environment, as well 

as forming new linguistic expressions to describe these phenomena.  

 

In the introduction to Nuanua: pacific writing in english since 1980 (1994) an 

anthology of writing from the Pacific Islands, Albert Wendt states that the word ‘nuana’ 

meaning ‘rainbow’ is an apt expression to describe the “diversity of cultures and 

languages, of fauna and flora found in Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia  [as well 

as] the richness and variety of our literatures, both oral and written” (1). Wendt defines 

“Pacific literature [as] that written or composed by Pacific Islands peoples, especially 

the indigenous peoples.” (2). Interestingly he maintains that though the missionaries 

introduced literacy, in fact it was the native speakers who did most of the converting to 

Christianity and thus used their own languages in the process—as he says they 

“indigenised writing” (1). Further he writes:  

 

We have indigenised and enriched the language of the colonisers and used it 

to declare our independence and uniqueness; to analyse colonialism itself 

and its effects upon us; to free ourselves of the mythologies created about us 

in colonial literature. (3) 

 

The transcultural nature of this writing is emphasised when he writes of how “[a]ll 

cultures are becoming, changing in order to survive, absorbing foreign influences, 

continuing, growing. (…) For me the post in post-colonial does not mean just after, it 

also means around, through, out of, alongside, and against”—all characteristics typical 

of the transcultural (3, emphasis in the original). Many of the extracts from longer texts 

and poems in nuana illustrate clearly Wendt’s point, for example, the ironic poem by 

Jon Jonassen “Saved” (48) and the sarcastic “Darkness within the light” by Kauraka 

Kauraka from the Cook Islands. As Wendt himself writes in the poem “Shaman of 

Vision” “we measure ourselves against words” (324). Since language is the most 

important feature of culture let us look at how this is affects transculturation in the 

Pacific area. 

 

Pacific writing, both in language, content and genre, is often characterized by a use of 

language that has highly local significance in a global context. By that I mean that 

cultural phenomena are expected to be understood by the reader, often making the 

potential ‘insider’ reader ‘strange,’ as Reed Way Dasenbrock and Peter Simpson have 

commented. Dasenbrock posits that texts in English which are interpolated with 

language other than English turn the reader from the dominant culture into the ‘other.’ 

This brings in the whole concept of register, that is the form of language that is 

particular to one individual or a group—a kind of code. Expressions, which might be 

considered grammatically or politically incorrect elsewhere, are acceptable within this 

framework. As Ashcroft points out “our identity, our subjectivity, is performed by, 

rather than embodied in language” (2009b :103, emphasis in the original). Language 



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and use of the native language in a text otherwise in English can make the text exotic 

and emphasize the gap between global reader and local writer, or, we can ask, does it 

equate the cultures, since no translation is necessary for those living in the country. 

Maori writing in English, in particular, exemplifies the use of linguistic expressions that 

are mutually understood by New Zealanders of all cultural backgrounds, though not 

necessarily by others, for example, marae, whakapapa, whanui, and the names of flora 

and fauna.  

 
This marks one of the major differences between the narrative expression of 

transculturation and translated identities in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Aotearoa is a country where all are immigrants and have come of their own accord—the 

Maori coming first from Polynesia and bringing with them Polynesian culture with 

advanced cultural artefacts and its class distinctions, which Alan Duff has dealt with in 

Once We Were Warriors (1990) where he criticizes the Maori for forgetting their 

heritage, a theme also taken up in The Matriarch (1986) where Witi Ihimaera relates the 

history of one of the noble Maori families and the powerful women of the past. Though 

fictional stories these texts are underscored by other historical documentary records 

 

In Australia the situation was different as the immigrant population displaced the 

indigenous population in a typical colonial civilising mission, in addition to there being 

no one major indigenous language. As Brian Castro writes: 

 

Australia has had a long history of confusing the racial with the geographic 

and the linguistic. Given that nations emerge out of an ambivalence about 

themselves, as Benedict Anderson said, ‘they express an immemorial past 

and a limitless future, working alongside and against large cultural systems 

that preceded them’, Australia has had to define itself against others. But 

the tendency has been that instead of defining itself, and realising itself as a 

continually changing society, it has nostalgically yearned for stasis, drawing 

on a large number of myths which, while uniting segments of its population, 

retards its overall ability to absorb newness and deal adequately with others. 

(“Writing Asia”, emphasis in the original) 

 

The role of language is at the core of mismatching. How often does a text mean 

something totally different to one person, due not only to his/her own use of language, 

or knowledge of the culture described, but it also varies according to the experience of 

the individual. A text read by a twenty-year old may be interpreted quite differently by 

the same person twenty or thirty years later. This aspect of perspective is often 

overlooked in literary critical commentaries, but it is just this which makes literature 

such a powerful tool for understanding of other cultures. As Castro writes: 

 

Language marks the spot where the self loses its prison bars--where the 

border crossing takes place, traversing the spaces of others. (…) When we 

translate from one language to another we not only reinvent ourselves but 

we free up the sclerotic restrictions of our own language. We feel free to 

transgress, to metamorphose, to experience the uncanny, where we are 

receiving what Wilson Harris has called the 'quantum immediacy' of another 

culture. Other cultures and languages reinforce and enrich us by powerfully 



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affecting and destabilising our familial tongue. We gain by losing ourselves. 

(“Writing Asia”) 

 

This destabilizing process is frequently expressed and understood through the 

perspective of the narrative expression. 

 

 

Perspective 
 

 

Perspective is a dual phenomenon – the one who sees and is seen – highlighting the 

distance and gap between identities.  Jakob Lothe sees perspective as the narrative agent 

that perceives that there are different forms and degrees of perception. In the paper 

“Transculturation and Perspective in Modernism and Postcolonialism: Joseph Conrad’s 

Heart of Darkness and Assia Djebar’s So Vast the Prison” given in 2011 he states that: 

“narrative perspective plays a key role in the author’s sustained attempts to identify and 

negotiate various kinds of linguistic disruption, suppression and marginalization,” and 

referring to Mieke Bal suggests that “perspective does not necessarily refer exclusively 

to the agent that perceives or focalizes, it can also be linked to the agent that is being 

focalized,” in other words the narrative perspective, too, is crossing borders. Looked at 

in this way the short story especially those termed vignettes could be an example of 

such narrative expression. We look in through a window but know nothing of the before 

or after, and each character is observing the other. Frank Sargeson and Katherine 

Mansfield, (especially the perspective in her New Zealand stories), are masters of this 

art. Take, for example, Frank Sargeson’s “The Making of a New Zealander”: 

 

Nick and I were sitting on a hillside and Nick was saying he was a New 

Zealander and he knew he wasn’t a New Zealander. And he wasn’t a 

Dalmatian any more.  

He knew he wasn’t anything any more. (Manhire 107) 

 

The ‘I’ person sees potential for Nick to be like any other New Zealander, marry and 

settle down. But Nick is conscious of his difference, or his perspective of himself as a 

person not really belonging anywhere.  

  

Similarly in David Ireland’s Burn the gaze is clearly stated—Jimmy’s son, Gordon, 

although he has received an education and goes to the city to work, returns disillusioned 

as to his possibilities in the white man’s world. Being Aboriginal he has problems 

getting a job because the colour of his hands give him away as being Aboriginal (132), 

so he is stereotyped. In other words he is judged by his appearance not his skills. The 

discussion of Gordon’s situation in the text is of an attitude prevalent in much political 

and social debate today.  

 

Other authors who spring to mind as illustrative of this mismatching of perspectives are 

David Malouf, Alan Duff and Ania Walwicz. In Remembering Babylon, a kind of 

parallel to Duff’s text, we have several examples of the mismatching of perspectives. 

The idea that Gemmy Fairley is a ‘white Aborigine’ is basically a contradiction in 

terms, and the perspective on and glorification of the remembered life back in Glasgow 

is also false. To Mr. Frazer Gemmy is an object of study to prove what happens to a 



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person who “goes bush” – he does not really see him as a person, rather as a source of 

information. Yet Gemmy is portrayed as acutely conscious of Fraser’s perspective on 

him. Through the diverse responses to Gemmy, and the Aborigines who visit him, 

Malouf allows us as readers to see Gemmy, both as he sees himself and as others see 

him, and that the settlers’ perspectives on themselves are no longer the same. Gemmy’s 

entry into their closed world breaks the artificial harmony which existed on the surface. 

If we think of this text in terms of mismatching perspectives we can see how many 

aspects of stereotyping become determinative of an understanding of the ‘other’. 

 

But to turn to Duff and Walwicz. Alan Duff’s Both Sides of the Moon (1998) epitomizes 

the ambiguity of perspective. Duff makes the protagonist, Jimmy, who is conscious of 

his own mixed cultural identities, awaken to what his life is like. The narrator by 

retelling the ancestral history told to him is also an implied reader translating what he 

hears about family history to coincide with his own experience of life and the dual 

feeling of shame because he belongs nowhere. The opening pages of this text illustrate 

his confusion.  

 

I am torn; yet I am more whole, since I am of both understandings, though 

no singular one. I am two races, two cultures and, most of all, two different 

thinkings. I am in a way against myself. But I can speak for both. (7)  

 

I am born of each of these. A half-caste being of neither one nor the other. 

Indigenous yet foreigner. Coloniser and colonised. Not brown; not white. 

Thus I am everything of my country’s main racial origins and yet nothing. 

(8) 

 

Here we are at the heart of the issue of mismatching perspectives and identities that 

many protagonists in Australasian literature express, reader and writer viewing these 

situations from differing perspectives. In many ways Jimmy, rather like Gemmy in 

Remembering Babylon, is the ultimate transcultural person. Not only are both seen as 

ethnically mixed, but their emotional and social lives may be seen as a cultural 

balancing act, much in the manner indicated by the protagonist in Castro’s Birds of 

Passage. The difference lies in the fact that Jimmy, an outsider and insider to himself, 

comes to a positive conclusion by accepting that his difference will never change, 

whereas Gemmy takes the notes on which he thinks his identity is written and tries to 

escape back to his former life. 

 

I would suggest that the title of Duff’s book, indicating both sides of the moon, the dark 

and the light, is symbolic of the issue of transculturation. Just as the moon revolves, 

ever changing from day to day, so Jimmy lives in a state of perpetual struggle to find his 

identity, or rather his compatible identities, that is who he is. The structure of the text, 

weaving in and out, and juxtaposing the past and the present, underscores Jimmy’s 

search. His life is a journey along ‘routes’ to find his ‘roots’ to use Stuart Hall’s words. 

 

Similar thoughts are expressed in two poems by Maori writers, “The Pakeha Half” by 

Pearl de Vere Boyed   

 

I will not let you take away 

that which is mine,  



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making me 

choose to be 

only one or the other; 

I also speak with other ancestors 

and share their pain and pride; 

sing their songs;  

pray their prayers; 

and hear their forebodings. 

 

Look close upon my face 

and see me as I am. 

Half and half. (Te Ao Marama 3: 1993, 35) 

 

And Rosemary Kohu Hinewirangi in one of her poems  “I Am Maori” poses the 

question: 

 

Am I Maori? 

Yes I am 

For I have brown skin. 

… 

Am I Maori? 

No. My language is English. 

 

 

And then concludes that she feels she is becoming Maori as she learns more about her 

ancestors and culture, but still ends with the same question as she began, “Am I Maori?”  

- it depends who is observing (Te Ao Marama 3:1993, 51). Again the ambiguity of 

perspective is expressed. 

 

By many regarded as the angry (though no longer so young) man of New Zealand 

writing by Maori Duff has suffered from the interpretation of his works as 

autobiographical, or termed as autoethnography. Pratt defines the use of this word as 

“instances in which the colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways 

that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. (…) [and] construct in response to or in 

dialogue with those metropolitan representations” (7). This is exactly what Duff is 

doing in much of his work—taking contemporary situations and historical ideas of 

Maori and juxtaposing them to throw light on issues, which though they can be seen as 

personal given his own background, are fiction. To me, looking at his fiction in relation 

to his non-fiction writing and articles in the media, he is critiquing culture that remains 

static. The Maori warrior culture is portrayed as a binary world of black and white, 

either you are with us or against us, and at any moment losing a battle could turn you 

into a slave, or worse, a source of food. Duff does not spare the reader details of 

cannibalism. Whereas some critics have focused on the Maori history described, to me 

this is a background for what Duff really wants to say which is that we have to leave the 

old ways, acknowledge their existence, but belong in the present. The relating of the 

warrior past, not Te Amo whom Jimmy thinks is his ancestor, but chief warrior Te 

Aranui Kapi, who ran away from battle and caused the complete defeat and break up of 

his power and regime—the ultimate disgrace for a warrior, is juxtaposed to parental and 

social failure in Jimmy’s life. Te Aranui Kapi, the warrior, has an awakening when he 



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sees the consequences of all the fighting for a child swept down the river with its 

mother, who, though drowning, smiles at him in such a way that it haunts him 

permanently (182). He begins to reflect, something portrayed as a disaster for a warrior, 

who must never doubt that what he does is right. Duff is asking us as readers to accept 

that people may change and can no longer adhere to the old ways—they become human. 

These two aspects of life are also paralleled in the text in the portrayal of two groups of 

outcasts, those with whom Te Aranui Kapi seeks shelter, who are rejected by the clan 

because they are physically deformed, but are shown as intelligent and willing to 

encounter and mingle with the new white people who arrive. The other group remain in 

their old-fashioned ways continuing the old warrior regime but without any form for 

civilization, and finally go under.  

 

This interpretation is remarkably different from that of Otto Heim and others who see 

this book as one about shame, both on the part of the protagonist who is ashamed of his 

Maori mother’s behaviour, and of his own sexual failings, and on the guilty conscience 

of the Pakeha, and of Duff himself.  

 

If Both Sides of the Moon suggests that the image of the fierce Maori, 

despite its long history, still has the power to shock, it also indicates that 

what makes this image still compelling is the residue of unacknowledged 

shame in the bicultural relationship of Pakeha and Maori. As Jimmy’s story 

seeks to demonstrate, the confrontation of such shame can lead to the 

discovery of one’s ability to respond to how one is perceived by others and 

to imagine bicultural identities that acknowledge history without being 

trapped in it. Responding to his own reception, Duff’s shameful 

autoethnography seems to express his unease with his public perception by 

both defiantly stepping up his debunking rhetoric and gropingly searching 

for a more charitable attitude towards his enemies. If the former response 

appears to have exhausted itself in his latest novel, the latter still seems to 

leave room for imaginative exploration.” (Heim 2007) 

 

The shame can be understood if we look at the other half of Jimmy’s story, his teenage 

search for himself, corruption by a pedophile, and the perpetual state of being torn 

between loyalty to his mother who behaves like a slut, and his father who represents 

respectability. That critics such as Heim see the text as one of shame is credible given 

that Duff’s descriptions are graphically explicit, whether writing of the cannibalism of 

the warriors, paedophilia, or prostitution. He has been criticised for this—but what if we 

see the novel as of its time, where explicit references are common, and where Duff has 

a purpose in trying to explain the uncertainty of a teenage boy—searching for himself 

and his identity in a world of mixed impressions. His is not a straightforward childhood, 

torn as he is between the two cultural backgrounds with which he has been brought up, 

and the incompatibility of his parents. The transculturality in the text lies in constant 

border-crossings in which Jimmy moves back and forth between cultures, and not just 

ethnic ones, throughout the text which closes urging him “to come to this side of the 

moon. Tell[ing] him that dark is only but a step away, though a big step, from here this 

other all covered in light. In light, e kare, child, children of my beloved people” (314). 

 

 

 



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Different interpretations of this text are also seen in the covers of the texts. I have 

picked out two, but there is at least one more. Both Sides of the Moon as illustrated 

above clearly shows different Western views of Maori. One depicts a younger Maori 

man with half his face tattooed in a fairly traditional pattern, indicating his Maori 

ancestry; the other is to my mind more impressive and symbolic. It portrays an older 

Maori peering out of the light side of the moon, but sitting on the dark side of it—the 

man in the moon—looking down on a fence. The covers invite different interpretations. 

Though both men are Maori they are basically different—the one with the tattoos is 

representative of a cultural heritage, in the other the fence indicates a border that has to 

be crossed and re-crossed or broken down while the older man represents the wisdom 

and knowledge of the elders and the heritage of Maoridom. To me this is more symbolic 

of the theme of transculturation—the constant waning and waxing of the moon as 

symbolic of Jimmy’s ambiguity in relation to his Maori and Pakeha ancestry. 

 

Transculturality and the mismatching of perspectives also pervades the prose poetry of 

the Australian writer of Polish descent Ania Walwicz. Her texts are spoken drama 

lending themselves to theatrical presentation, as she has said in interviews. She is 

voyeur and author, and her gaze, often ironic and satiric, encompasses her own cultural 

background as well as that of Australia. Writing is an act of exploration, whether of 

legend as in “Fairytale” that has a traditional outline but with a twist, as well as humour 

and irony, or in her texts about everyday things, such as “white” about winter and snow 

or “travelling.” In “Fairytale” the author starts in a traditional manner, the tale of a king 

with three daughters whom he wants to marry off. But these are no ordinary princesses, 

they have doctorates and high demands on their suitors, so much so that “the king 

suggested maybe you could marry two princes apiece a good looking for sleeping with 

and a clever one to talk to” (1992, 45)  Instead they use, like Frankenstein, scientific 

methods to produce the perfect husband. Even after marrying them they are no longer 

satisfied, so kill their husbands “because they enjoyed working in the laboratory more 

than marriage” (45). The anticipated perspective of the reader is mismatched by the 

characters in the tale and their views on male perfection.  In her meditation on Hope’s 

poem “Australia” from 1939, about the country to which Walwicz has emigrated, the 

inward looking gaze on the land is prominent and underscored by the repeated use of 

‘you’ whether in descriptions of the natural: “You big ugly. You too empty. You desert 

with your nothing nothing nothing,” or in the ‘imagined’ gaze on Walwicz herself, the 

foreigner: “You make me a dot in the nowhere. You never accept me. For your own 

(…) You tell me I look strange.” In these texts by Walwicz traditional and 

contemporary attitudes are interwoven and combined in border-crossings that confront, 

even force, the reader (or listener) to take a new look at the ‘glocal.’ 

 



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Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 

 

 

200 

 

In conclusion, I have sketched above some ideas as to how we may approach the issue 

of transculturation in literature from the Pacific. I have used the word mismatching of 

perspectives consciously as I see the gaze as manifold, the Pacific reader, the 

indigenous reader, and the global reader. Like much else in life, the very expressiveness 

of these texts adds a dimension to them providing both glocal and global readings. We 

can also ask whether looking at literature from a transcultural perspective also expresses 

a resistance to the project of global modernization, since the fictional characters are 

often portrayed as ambiguous in relation to who they are. An understanding of the 

complexity apparent in such literature can thus be contributive to racial and cultural 

understanding. 

 

 

Works cited 
 

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Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.  

Attwell, David (2006) Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary 

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Castro, Brian. (1996) “Writing Asia” Australian Humanities Review. 

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Coolabah, No.10, 2013, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians, 

Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 

 

 

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Anne Holden Rønning is Associate Professor emerita at the University of Bergen, 

Norway. Her research interests and fields of publication are Women’s Studies and 

postcolonial literatures and cultures, especially from Australia and New Zealand. She 

has published several articles in these fields. She was co-editor of Identities and Masks: 

Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (2001); Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial 

in the Postnational (2007); and author of “For Was I not Born Here?” Identity and 

Culture in the Work of Yvonne du Fresne (2010). In 2012 she was visiting professor and 

gave a Masters course on Cultural identities at the University of Barcelona, Spain. 

 

                                                 
i
 The term ‘glocal’, an appropriation of the local into the global, which emphasises the influence of the 
local culture over the global, is particularly useful when writing of transcultural aesthetics since the two 

worlds are not exclusive of each other, but intertwined.  In many texts an investigation of identity is 

typified by a clash between the self and these surrounding cultures.  

http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/