85 pages • 2 hours read
Potiki
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Prologue-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Prologue Summary
The Prologue tells the story of the creation of a Maori wharenui meeting-house, which will, as the book unfolds, become one of the focal points of the narrative. It describes the life of a carver who devotes himself to building houses for his people, and to carving his ancestors out of wood, so that his people’s forbearers can be remembered. At the age of 10, his parents wrap him in scarves and position him at the elbow of a master carver, whom the boy observes closely for years. When the boy turns 14, the master carver makes him a mallet and instructs him to unwrap himself from the scarves and start work, advising him of two important rules to observe: “Do not carve anyone in living memory and don’t blow on the shavings or your wood will get up and crack you” (9).
As he grows up, the boy becomes “master of his craft” (9), as well as a “great storyteller” (9). Towards the end of his life, as he is working on “what he knew would be the last house he would ever carve” (9), his people grant him the honor of deciding which ancestor the last poupou (carved wooden figure) that will adorn the house should represent. The carver decides that, contrary to the rules of his craft, he wants the last figure to represent someone from his “own living memory” (10).
Several weeks later, he unveils his last piece of work, whose shape and features, including a chisel-shaped penis, all reflect the life and work of the carver himself. However, as he explains, he has left space below his poupou’s feet for the “lower figure” (12), meaning that the carving cannot yet be completed and will have to remain like this until “a future time” (12). He then asks of his people that they keep alive his memory by allowing his final poupou to live in the meeting-house. Once the people have left his workshop, the carver breaks the second rule of his craft and blows on the face of his poupou, thus ending his life.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Roimata”
The opening chapter of the novel is narrated by Roimata, who lives with her family on a curved piece of land that overlooks the sea and belongs to the families of the Tamihana tribe. She and her husband, Hemi Tamihana, have three biological children, each with a distinct personality. They also have an adopted son, Tokowaru-i-te-Marama, or Toko, who is two years younger than Manu. Hemi’s sister, Mary, also lives with them.
Roimata has known and “loved” both Hemi and Mary since the age of 5. She recalls that at school they were taught the importance of fulfilling God’s will, which dictated that they behave well and learn, and they were rewarded for doing so by being allowed to take either a picture of a saint or a toffee from the “green Jesus tin” (16). Mary did not attend school to learn like the other students, but instead spent her time there dusting and polishing for Sister Anne. Roimata felt protective towards Mary and would look after her at school.
Roimata also recalls that at weekends her widowed and lonely father would bring her to the Tamihana land, where he would fish or help the Tamihanas in their gardens, while she would swim, play, work, eat seafood and spend time with Mary and the other Tamihana children. She secretly admired Hemi and dreamed of riding on his horse with her arms around him, as Mary did.
After his father died, Hemi left school and dedicated himself to working on and learning about the Tamihana land and, although he stopped doing this for a while, he always knew he would come back to this and that the land would once again sustain his family.
The chapter closes with Roimata’s comments on the freedom she associates with the shore, near to where she now lives, and she recollects having once spent a whole night here, waiting for the morning “that would become a new beginning” (18).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Mary”
Chapter 2 describes a day in the life of Mary, who looks after the wharenui (meeting house). As she makes her way along the beach, in the direction of the meeting house, she restores the living things she comes across to the sea and puts any litter she finds in her bucket. In the distance, she distinguishes a man, Joe-billy, whom she has not seen since the summer, and greets him. Before entering the wharenui, she arranges with Granny Tamihana that, as usual, she will have tea with her later.
She then gets to work dusting and polishing the poupou (carved wooden figures), each of which she has a name for, pausing at midday to go to Granny Tamihana’s house for tea and jam with bread. After this, she resumes her work, working “her cloth slowly from head to shoulders and down the arms and bodies and legs” (21) of each of the figures, singing as she does so. She then comes to her favorite figure, loving-man, which she polishes carefully and “lovingly” (21). Noticing that one of the figure’s eyes is missing, she finds a little black stone to place in the empty socket. Once she has finished polishing him, she embraces the “carved body” (22).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Roimata”
Chapter 3 is a flashback to before Roimata and Hemi were married. Having spent the last twelve years away from home, Roimata is now on a train that is taking her back to the papakainga (ancestral land). She feels a need to return to Hemi and Mary, and desires the security that she believes Hemi can offer her. She passes the little railway house where she had lived with her father and recalls that, at the time of her father’s death, the Tamihanas had invited her to live with them. Her father, however, had already arranged her for her to go away to school.
On alighting from the train, Roimata decides to walk along the beach in order to approach home unnoticed. Unable to see any lights from the houses ahead and detecting shadows at the far end of the bay, she realizes that everyone must be at the wharenui (meeting house) to honor a death, although she is unaware who has died. Unwilling to arrive at the meeting-house at such a late hour, Roimata spends the night on the beach.
The next morning, after bathing in the sea, she makes her way to the meeting-house. As she approaches, she notices a bus-load of mourners arriving and greets them. She joins them as they are called forward into the marae (ceremonial ground), where the funeral rites are conducted. As no one from Hemi’s family is present on the verandah of the meeting house, Roimata guesses that the deceased must be one of them. As predicted, on entering the building, she sees Hemi’s family gathered round a casket in which Hemi and Mary’s mother lies. The mourners partake in the ritual of making speeches and singing songs, in which they invoke their dead ancestors in order to mourn for them again, and send Hemi’s mother to follow “in the footsteps of those who have gone ahead” (28). Roimata then embraces Mary and greets the other members of the family, including Hemi. She spends the next few days of the funeral helping with the catering and caring for the guests who arrive, reverting back to her former routines “as though twelve years had never been” (30), and does not speak to Hemi again until the evening of the day his mother is buried. When they finally speak and Roimata tells him that it was not his mother’s death that had led her to return home, Hemi is happy and suggests that her return was, just like everything else, “meant” (31) to be.
Prologue-Chapter 3 Analysis
The opening chapters of Potiki immerse the reader in the traditions and beliefs of the Maori people, who began to migrate to New Zealand from different parts of Polynesia from possibly as early as the 9th century, shaping some important thematic aspects of the narrative. One of the most striking ideas that emerges from these chapters is the importance the Maori attach to death and the strong connection that exists between the living and the dead. Chapter 3 presents, through the eyes of Roimata, a traditional Maori funeral. True to Maori tradition, Hemi’s mother’s funeral lasts several days and is attended by busloads of visitors who have traveled great distances to honor and bid farewell to the deceased. The tangi (funeral rites) takes place on the marae, a sacred ceremonial ground that serves religious and social purposes in Polynesian societies, while the body of the deceased is housed in an open casket in the wharenui and surrounded by members of the bereaved family. The tangi is presented as a union between the living and all those from the Maori community who have died: “[...] we stopped to tangi for death, for the deaths from many ages [...], for all the many dead that gathered there with us” (27). Furthermore, the funeral chants sung by the mourners suggest that death is perhaps considered a higher state of existence than life on earth, as the deceased is told by the mourners to “wrap death’s fine cloak about” (29) her and “Return to the Homeland” (28), referring to Hawaiki, where, according to Polynesian mythology, the Maori originally emigrated from.
The connection between the living in the dead is also present in Maori tradition of adorning their meeting houses with the poupou (wooden figures) of their ancestors. As the Prologue, which describes the creation of the wharenui of the novel, points out, the Maori “wished to include all the famous ancestors to which they were linked” (10). The presence of these ancestors among the living is then evoked in Chapter 2 by Mary, who, in a somewhat sensual manner, polishes the penis-man poupou from the Prologue, and they “put their arms round each other holding each other closely, listening to the beating and the throbbing and the quiet of their hearts” (22).
There is also the suggestion in the narrative that death can lead to a rebirth or a new beginning. As the Prologue states, with reference to the poupou that the carver fashions from tree wood: “The tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has, after its first death, a further fruiting at the hands of a master” (7). Similarly, in Chapter 3, Roimata comments on the ability of seagulls, which feed on dead creatures they find on the shore, to “take up death and renew it” (23). The shore, “where the sea puts up its dead” (18) is, in fact, a symbol of death and, by extension, freedom, a place to find “the beginning—or the end that is the beginning” (18). It is significant, therefore, that it is here where Roimata spends a night that will lead to a new phase in her life, or, as she puts it, “a new beginning” (18). This idea is echoed in Chapter 3, which recounts the same night in more detail. Roimata describes her experience of bathing in the sea the following morning as a “renewal, like the washing of hands that take leave of death and turns one toward the living” (26).
Another salient feature of these chapters is the human-like presence of the natural world, with which the lives of the Maori community appear to be closely aligned. The sea, which is often personified, is a constant presence, whose “soft whisperings” (22) and “insistent nudgings” (26) accompany the characters in their activities. During the funeral, the sea even partakes in the bereavement of the mourners by gashing “its forehead on the rocks” (27). Similarly, trees play an important role in Maori traditions. The wooden poupou that the carver crafts in the Prologue “developed first in the forests, in the tree wombs” (7). Moreover, the deference that the carver shows his creation, and the trees it came from, in accepting that he is not its master, suggests that nature should be treated with respect. This idea is echoed in Chapter 2, by Mary, as she makes her way along the water’s edge and returns living things such as “a crab, a shellfish or a weed” (19) to the sea, and removes from the beach any “paper, plastic or tin” (19).
Unlock all 85 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: