ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses primarily upon Witi Ihimaera’s 1997 novel The Dream Swimmer, which, like Hulme’s The Bone People, represents the diseased body as a metaphor for cross-cultural conflict. Where Hulme advocates a bicultural or multicultural national identity, however, Ihimaera advances a separatist model, arguing for the establishment of a ‘Maori nation’ which is to rival or supersede the socio-political structures and ideologies of the Pakeha ‘majority’ culture. Ihimaera’s arguments in The Dream Swimmer are closely related to his recent political views, which have transmuted from an earlier bicultural or inclusive position not unlike Hulme’s, into a more radical and separatist stance. This chapter analyses Ihimaera’s representation of European disease – in particular, the ‘Spanish influenza’ pandemic of 1918 – as an allegory for colonial incursion, and as a catalyst for Maori millennialist and nationalist movements of the twentieth century.
