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This article analyzes Selina Tusitala Marsh's collection of poetry, Fast Talking PI (2009) in the context of the poet's call for the 'Tasifikisation" of New Zealand literature. It focuses on three poetic acts: the naming and unnaming of the Pacific self, the recovering of past and present Pacific female voices, and the remythologizing of figures and places. These acts locate Marsh's poetry within the decolonizing paradigm of postcolonial literature and exemplify the postcolonial categories of hybridity, syncretism and transnationalism.
In her chapter in Mark Williams' A History of New Zealand Literature (2016), titled "'Nafanua and the New World': Pasifika's Writing of Niu Zealand," the poet and critic Selina Tusitala Marsh calls for the "Pasifikising" of space and place through the reimagining of Pacific and Western culture. To her mind, "Pasifikising" involves literary acts ranging from the "renaming, reclaiming, and rewriting of literary territories to the remythologizing of cultural figures" (360). The programme she maps out belongs to the "decolonizing" paradigm of postcolonial literature and thus continues the struggle of Pacific literature for recognition and "literary decolonisation" that started with Albert Wendt in the 1970s.
Marsh's collection of poetry, Fast Talking PI, released in 2009, had already fulfilled part of that programme. Its very structure reveals a poetics and politics of reinventing a Pacific self. The book brings together thirty-two poems divided into three sections: the first, "Tusitala," explores how the personal may be political in a Pacific context; the next one, "Talkback," is the poet's version of writing back to the empire, and finally, "Fast Talking PIs," in which the acronym PI stands for Pacific Islander, creates a gendered and racial counter discourse in the present.
Gender and racial identity politics are at the heart of Marsh's reimagining of the Pacific, but although such politics is still relevant today, it has become outdated as a term since its heyday in the 1970s, and needs to be reinvented to account for the complexities of group belongings. In particular, identity politics entails such pitfalls as the reification of identities, as it is premised on categories that exclude "others." Thus, it leaves aside hybrid people: they become lost between two cultures, like Marsh herself who has been accused of being "not brown enough" by members of the...