The Whale and the Girl: a Reading of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider from a Blue and Partnership Perspective

This paper analyses Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (Ihimaera [1987]), one of the most renowned Māori novels, from a twofold perspective: first, through an ecologically-oriented "blue option" (Hau’ofa [2008], Ingersoll [2016], Mathieson [2021]), an exciting and provocative slant that emerged in the humanities as a framework to investigate sea literatures and cultures of the ocean, and second, through a "partnership thought" (Eisler [1988]; [1995]; [2002], Eisler - Fry [2019]), a transformational approach propounded by the social theorist and activist Riane Eisler on the urgent need to re-think relationships between individuals, communities and the environment (Riem - Thieme [2020], Riem - Hughes-d’Aeth [2022]). The Whale Rider is a powerful decolonial (Quijano [2007], Mignolo [2012]) story that recounts the adventures of Kahu, the female descendent of a strict patriarchal Māori community, who will have to re-establish not only the sacred role of women within her society but also revive the tribe’s ancestral bond with the more-than-human world (Hubbel - Ryan [2021]). In tune with the Māori spiralling perception of life, the analysis uncovers Ihimaera’s narrative strategies in depicting an ever shifting "tidalectic" (Brathwaite [1992]) reality in which gender boundaries, mythical genealogies and natural manifestations are re-drawn in light of a more interrelated and peaceful oceanic future. The Whale Rider presents an insightful re-writing of Western-European and Northern Atlantic postcolonial views through an alter-native and "blue" text that depicts an-Other and more ecologically sustainable partnership world.