ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Hau’ofa's characters grasp utterly the norms of the Global North, but they fail—and this failure is craftily disingenuous—to emancipate themselves from the ironies, ambiguities and contradictions, comic as well as economic, that emerge whenever they call upon practices and attributes that differ relationally from the norm, the Global North, thereby constituting exceptionalities. The essay shows how, in his two works of fiction, Tales of the Tikongs and Kisses in the Nederends, Hau’ofa employs the attributes of a sly naivety to depict the norm, the north, as it functions in the south while, paradoxically, subverting the north's normative value by citing exceptional southern practices that defy incorporation.
