Erin Conley
UCLA Department of English
“We were here first. We have never left”:
Subject Forming Assemblages in Keri Hulme’s Stonefish
Sentient air balloons, anthropophagic oysters, and vindictive onions are just a few of the creatures populating New Zealand’s postapocalyptic landscapes in Keri Hulme’s 2007 short story collection, Stonefish . Many of the segments in Stonefish feature humans interacting with nonhumans like the anthropophagic oyster in ways that destabilize ideas about personhood and subjectivity. This assemblage of speculative writing also constantly shifts between layered literary forms—from prose fiction, prose poetry and lyric poetry to lists, recipes, and historical reporting. I want to argue that Stonefish configures subjectivity as an assemblage that emerges from the naturalcultural contact zone—a material discursive space that engenders subject forming attachments between human and nonhuman entities. Moreover, I want to assert that
Stonefish demonstrates how assemblage functions as both a means of configuring subjectivity and as a tactic of expression that politicizes form.
Historically, Hulme can be situated among a group of writers who emerged from the
Māori Renaissance, a movement sparked during the global upheavals of the 1960s in response to the socio-economic and political domination of Māori people by Europeans, called Pākehā in the
Māori language.
During the Maori Renaissance,
Māori people fostered a major resurgence of tribal identity by asserting political power through organizing and by reclaiming Māori language, religion, artistic expression, and genealogy, or * whakapapa (Kolig 236). Māori writers Patricia
Grace and Witi Ihimaera were some of the first to publish their fiction in the midst of this

Conley 2 political milieu, and they established environmentalism and colonialism as critical thematic touchstones for Māori writing. But while Hulme’s writing stands with Grace and Ihimaera in providing a distinctly postcolonial perspective by privileging indigenous epistemologies and cultural forms, her writing is distinct from these figures in the ways it departs from realisms characterizing much writing from the Maori Renaissance.
Time, place, and identity remain critical issues in scholarship on Hulme’s writing, and previous scholarship reveals the extent to which the form of Hulme’s writing is inextricably linked to questions of Māori epistemology expressed through the cultural idiom of whakapapa.
Though whakapapa is often referred to as a tracing of genealogy, this is an oversimplification of what is actually an entire phenomenology of place linking individual, family, and tribal identities with location in what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls a “corporeal history” (45). In Routes and
Roots DeLoughrey notes that “Unlike the noun ‘genealogy,’ which signifies an originary moment or ancestor, whakapapa, an intransitive verb and noun, suggests a performative rendering of meta-physical history rather than a static or essentialist lineage system” (164).
Moreover, whakapapa “historicizes the connection between indigenous people and national place” (DeLoughrey 165). I would extend this historicized connection to ecology as well because whakapapa is also a way of imagining a layered, enfolding web of being—whakapapa isn’t about a single individual’s familial lineage, but a holistic picture of interconnected beings that includes nonhuman entities as well. Though DeLoughrey describes these relationships as rhizomatic, I think they can also be described in terms of assemblage.
*Stonefish as a whole is structured around whakapapa. The text opens with an invocation of Hulme’s own biography: an inscription about Hulme’s mother written in Māori language is followed by a list titled “Remembering the Dead.” This list includes the names of family

Conley 3 members, longtime friends, and artistic collaborators. Stonefish ends with a list of previous publications for some of the text’s segments; this list is not titled “Acknowledgements” or
“Permissions” as we might expect, but “
Ka Whakatau
,” a Māori phrase suggesting a formal welcoming. By closing with a welcoming, Stonefish performs the lateral assemblative shifts of whakapapa through a coeval rendering of past, present, and future.
Each segment in Stonefish refracts this coeval assemblage through settings that suggest an otherworldly time and place—a New Zealand that is not quite present, not quite future, and not quite past. But compared to some of the more experimental landscapes in Stonefish , the segment titled “Getting It” opens onto a rather mundane suburban environment in which a bored, nameless, and evidently genderless bureaucrat narrates his or her struggle to stay awake during yet another session of a land claims court. In this segment, a motley crew of mythological Maori creatures occupies this land claims court in order to demand restitution for land stolen from them by humans. The story replicates a real life bureaucratic structure that administers land disputes between Maori people and the British Crown.
On this “Boring Boring Boring” day the court is adjudicating claims about the construction of a new “boutique tasteful ecofriendly village” on an area known as the Neck
(Hulme 89, 90). A handful of people attending the hearing object to this gentrification, and among these characters are a white conservationist, a curmudgeonly homeowner, and a
Māori tribal representative. As these humans make their statements to the court, the narrator is only able to stay awake by talking to his or her partner, Sam, who is also a court reporter.
Such a biting representation of the land court incites a harsh appraisal of the court’s reallife counterpart, the Waitangi Tribunal. The Waitangi Tribunal is a justice system created in
1975 to administer redresses for
Māori disenfranchisement from land and resources (Stokes

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184). The Waitangi Tribunal arose in response to growing agitation against governmental privatization of natural resources—a process that violated stewardship agreements established by the controversial 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and most
Māori tribal groups (DeLoughrey 165).
This conflict between the land developers and the their human opponents crystallizes the historical antagonism between British colonialism and
Māori sovereignty and exposes how the land courts actually aggravate Māori disenfranchisement by disregarding the historicized relationships that Māori share with the land through whakapapa. As DeLoughrey points out, these land courts validate land claims through western notions of family lineage; this method of adjudicating claims risks shifting communally held lands into private ownership, which rips
Māori from “their direct links to ancestors…and the tribe itself” and from their historicized relationship to the land (175, 177).
In addition to the criticism of the land claims court that this opening scene offers, I think it is also notable how the text emphasizes the dehumanizing effects of the boring, bureaucratic process. No one in this courtroom listens to each other, and as a result there is an utter lack of reciprocity in communication and understanding. Moreover, the bureaucratic structure has turned participants into automatons. The narrator asserts that these hearings are utterly pointless, a “total waste of time” (Hulme 90) because decisions about restitution and land use are ultimately in the hands of the economic developers who wield influence over the tribunal judges—the participants in this process are powerless in the face of capitalist economic development. There is something about this lack of agency in the context of bureaucracy that suggests to me a gap in or lack of subjectivity. It’s as though the court form itself prohibits interactions that would result in subject

Conley 5 forming attachments between people through the possibility of looking back at one another and acknowledging the existence of the other.
*Donna Haraway provides a useful way of thinking about these subject forming attachments in her work on companion species. In When Species Meet , Haraway asserts that subject formation happens in relation to one’s encounter with other subjects—both human and nonhuman (or, critters as Haraway sometimes likes to say). These subject forming attachments occur in what Haraway has called the naturalcultural contact zone, which is a material-discursive field where species meet one another and become. She notes:
Looking back [at the other] takes us to seeing again, to respecere , to the act of respect. To hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem: all of that is tied to polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species meet. (19).
This is a process of world building that has the potential to produce a more just and peaceful existence, but meeting in the naturalcultural contact zone can also be a profoundly violent and disruptive subject forming experience.
*I introduce Haraway’s work here in order to frame my discussion of the violent disruption that finally awakens our sleepy narrator. Just as the narrator complains about having to listen to yet another boring witness, a creature standing “two and a half metres tall” and
“covered in long red hair” that “drapes down his belly” walks into the courtroom; the narrator is so shocked, he or she can only exclaim, “SHIT!” (Hulme 92). The creature is a maeroero and he is joined by three other individuals: a young female maeroero identified as his daughter; the ponaturi, a hairless “little horror” with a “face pale as foam under moonlight, with eyes that are wholly red”; and the tūrehu, an ethereal fairy figure whose hair shines like “toetoe in the sun”

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(Hulme 93). The tūrehu wears a rāpaki, which is a skirt made out of feathers or grass, and a bolero jacket; this rāpaki, however, features “little green beetles flying out and around at erratic intervals” while the bolero jacket is make from “soft and gorgeous mottled mossgreen feathers” that subtly shift and move as if alive (Hulme 93).
The text represents these creatures as otherworldly, atavistic figures whose appearance grounds them in a world that is both earthbound and not at all of this earth. Though the creatures exhibit humanlike bodies and mannerisms, the bureaucratic officials insist on their nonhumaness; one officer timidly asserts, “If these—arnt [sic] hoaxes, they arnt [sic] humans either!” (Hulme
94). In one way, the timid official is correct; the creatures are different from humans in important ways. Their modes of communication place the creatures in an otherworldly state. The maeroero communicate through something like a song that seems more telepathic than aural, and the ponaturi communicates in speech that “crackles and hisses” and “sounds like high pitched static mixed with strata of loathing and spat hate” (Hulme 97). Collectively the creatures submit their objections to the new subdivision on a flax leaf, and they sign their names on the letter by poking holes in the leaf or scraping the surface of the leaf with their claws. The communicative renderings of these mythological creatures interpolate a reciprocal material-discursive response from the humans in the room, but part of the violence of this situation is precisely that the humans in the room refuse or are unable to respond in kind to this interpolation.
By erupting into the bureaucratic structure of the land claims court and demanding that the court recognize their existence, the creatures force the creation of a naturalcultural contact zone in which the creatures must be made significant others to the humans. Significantly, the creatures issue this demand in the form of a *poem:
We were here first. We have never left. We own our homelands.

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We prefer to be in shadows. We roam the lands at night.
We were on the Almost-island before you came, it has always been ours.
We will remain there, in company with the first arrivals.
We share with them but not with humans. Go away. Leave us alone . (Hulme 96)
It is important that the creature issues these demands in the form of poetry because the lyricism of poetry cuts through the logic of court rationality. A poem introduces a new discourse, a new way of conceptualizing arrivancy, indigeneity, and identity. With this poetic declaration, the creatures link their existence on the island to that of the first arrivants, or Maori people. This poetic rupture invokes a sense of timelessness that reiterates how Stonefish on the whole folds the past onto the present and the future. We might read the poem then as a performance of whakapapa because of the way it assembles the creatures together with Maori people in an ecological network with the land.
Notably, the poem also represents Maori people as nonhuman; I don’t see this move as one which denies humanity to Maori, but rather, one which expands notions of personhood to beings beyond homo sapiens. The poem asserts that the creatures have subjectivity and it configures indigenous subjectivity in a way that accounts for the flow of organisms through time and space—in this way, the text’s form explicitly overwrites western notions of indigeneity that represent individuals as natives fixed in time and space.
In conclusion, there are three important implications that we can glean from Hulme’s assemblage of speculative fiction in Stonefish . First, the way the text configures subjectivity actually expands notions of kinship relations by incorporating a conception of subjectivity

Conley 8 beyond human categories of existence. This means that humans and nonhuman entities share a stake in how we imagine subjectivity and personhood. It also means that genealogy becomes something that is both a tactic of tracing family and a reflection of how an individual fits into an ecology of humans and nonhumans. Such a configuration of indigeneity thus also helps us expands notions of ecologies by seeing how the individual body is connected to a broader web of being reflected in the material-discursive space of naturalculatural contact zones.
Second, both “Getting It” and Stonefish as a whole demonstrate how assemblages of writing perform rhizomatic disruptions of the hierarchical, Manichean categories generated by colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist ideologies. Hulme’s collection gestures toward assemblage as a tactic for resisting new formations of coloniality and oppression. The text’s form—as well as the poem that interrupts the court form—are politically charged in ways that are explicitly anticolonial.
Finally “Getting It” also opens onto questions about the violence of assemblage and significant otherness. Much of what Haraway asserts about the naturalcultural contact zone and about significant otherness suggests that encounters with the other in which the other is somehow incorporated into one’s own being might result in a more peaceful or just world. However,
“Getting It” ends on a note of violent threats against the survival of humans. The creatures issue a warning to the humans in the land claims court. The narrator explains that “The gist of the ponaturi submission is that, should a decision detrimental to their continued occupation of the sanctuary of the Neck be made by this council, war will be declared upon you all and everybody you have any dealings with” (Hulme 100). The segment ends with the narrator and Sam fleeing to the countryside as the island’s coastline is consumed. “We hope the Coast was enough,” the narrator says (Hulme 104). “Getting It” concludes then with the narrator and Sam establishing a

Conley 9 new existence that is both more difficult and more fulfilling than their lives in the land claims court. Their subject forming experience of this naturalcultural contact zone is embedded in an act of violence that also destroys much of the land that the creatures demanded that humans return to them. We are left then with the feeling that significant otherness is something that occurs in conjunction with a violent rupture of the status quo. This uncomfortable possibility engenders two very important questions that could guide how we approach texts like Stonefish in the future.
How do we, as scholars working in postcolonial studies and critical ecologies, situate that violence in the scope of historical and developing configurations of coloniality and globalization? And how might one imagine a world in which subject formation does not engender such violence?

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Works Cited
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island
Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii P, 2007.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.
Hulme, Keri. Stonefish . Wellington: Huia, 2005.
Kolig, Erich. “Of Condoms, Biculturalism, and Political Correctness: The Maori Renaissance and Cultural Politics in New Zealand.” Paideuma 46 (2000): 231-252.
Stokes, Evelyn. “The Treaty of Waitangi and the Waitangi Tribunal: Maori Claims in
New Zealand.”
Applied Geography 12 (1992): 176-191.