CULTURAL TRAUMA IN PATRICIA GRACE’S POTIKI

This article examines the concept of cultural trauma in postcolonial New Zealand literature through a case study of Patricia Grace’s Potiki, illustrating how storytelling functions as a medium for healing, resistance, and cultural renewal. Using theoretical frameworks from trauma studies—including the collective, ongoing nature of colonial trauma articulated by Jeff rey C. Alexander, Irene Visser, and Michael Rothberg—the study situates Potiki within the Māori cultural renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, marked by the reclamation of language, spirituality, and narrative authority. The methodology combines close reading of the novel’s hybrid structure, which integrates Māori oral traditions with the Western novel form, with thematic analysis of representations of land dispossession, violence, and community resilience. The analysis highlights Grace’s use of multiple narrators, fragmented chronology, and interwoven personal and collective histories to refl ect Māori conceptions of time and memory while contesting colonial historiography. The fi ndings demonstrate how Potiki dramatizes both the trauma of colonization—including appropriation and desecration of ancestral land—and the potential for regeneration through communal storytelling, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and cultural hybridity. By reclaiming narrative voice and embedding Māori language and spirituality within an English-language novel, Grace’s work enacts “postcolonial witnessing” that counters dominant colonial narratives, foregrounds indigenous perspectives, and envisions cultural continuity and adaptation.