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A Response to “In the Shadow Of Monte Cassino” by Lauren Keenan

Posted on by lindabue104
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It’s not easy to act according your parents’ will, especially when you do not know what secrets they live with.

In the short story “In the Shadow of Monte Cassino”, published in 2017 in Huia Short Stories 12 by Māori author Laruen Keenan, the journey of Eruera, a Māori man who reflects on his lifelong attempt to fulfil his father’s expectations, is described. Instead of focusing on himself, Eruera continues to base his life on his father’s judgements.

The only active part of the story is Eruera. He visits the battlefield in Italy where his father supposedly fought as soldier in the Second World War. As he walks towards Monte Cassino, his thoughts revolve around his late father and what the latter might say to him in this situation. When Eruera passes a cemetery, he coincidentally finds the grave of his uncle, at whom his late father was always angry. Now Eruera realises that his father never took part in WWII and just made it all up.

“Stupid, cheap map. He should have bought one from someone who spoke English while he was in Rome.”

(p. 71)

The story is told from Eruera’s point of view, but in the third person. Right from the beginning, I had a strange feeling that the main character has a really negative mindset in that sentence. As the story continued and Eruera made his way to Monte Cassino, I had the impression that the closer he got to the hill, the crazier his mind went. He is always looking for excuses not to climb up Monte Cassino. All these twists and turns are really well done by the author. When I read the story, I had an odd and intense feeling because he seemed stressed. At first I thought that he was looking forward to the trip, but when I looked at him more closely, I realised that his self-esteem decreased a bit every time he thought about his father (e.g. “Man up, boy, you wouldn’t lasted a day at Monte Cassino with that attitude.” p. 72). It seemed as though Eruera believed that no one respects him. Especially his own father was never proud of him, regardless of what he achieved.

In my opinion, the short story unrolls a lot of emotions from WWII. When we meet Eruera, he thinks he is the son of a Māori soldier who took part in the war to gain respect for his tribe, to be treated equally and to receive the full privilege of citizenship for his family. So Eruera has to respect his father and believes everything he says. Yet his father used to denigrate him by comparing him with his Uncle Gerry, who supposedly “died of shame after all these heroes came home. You’re just like your Uncle Gerry, both of you couldn’t have climbed Monte Cassino if you’d tried.” (p. 72) I strongly believe that is a reason why Eruera has such low self-esteem. Always being compared is hard, but being compared to someone who cannot climb up a hill is even worse. I suppose that the relationship between Eruera and his father was really toxic. As a result, he just remembers negative comments and bad comparisons. Even in the narrative present, when Eruera’s father is long dead, he feels the disappointment in every step he takes.

“Dad was long gone but Eruera still let him down.”

(p. 73)

After all the emotional ups and downs, this passage reveals that Eruera thinks he is failing and disappointing his father once again. It seems to me that he has the urge to show his father that he is capable of doing something right, like climbing Monte Cassino.

“Eruera should have paid better attention. He should have found out more about the war before dad dies.” (p. 72). On the one hand, Eruera remembers his father’s aggressive behaviour, on the other hand he misses him and regrets the time when he did not listen to his stories. I’m honestly surprised that Eruera’s feelings and his development could touch me so strongly. This turn of events throws a pitiful shadow on Eruera and makes him even smaller than he is. From time to time, his mind clears and he notices his surroundings. However, I guess Eruera is just looking for excuses not to climb the mountain.

In my opinion, the author is highly successful in creating a great tension. When I finally thought Eruera would climb up and feel relieved and happy, he entered the cemetery. Even though this moment was really dark, it also fascinated me. When Eruera recognized the name on the gravestone and found out what Uncle Gerry had done, it felt for me like Eruera’s world was falling apart because he finally understood why his grandparents had no contact to his father and why others gave him ugly nicknames.

I think Eruera must have been shocked at the first moment, but right after he likely felt relieved because he had uncovered the secret of his heroic father and lightened the big shadow hanging over him. To come back to my first impression of the short story, and having reread it, I feel like there is much to read between the lines. At first I thought that Eruera was a pitiful and sad man who has no goal, and only thinks about everything that has already happened, even imitating his father’s comments. From a more aware point of view I am certain that Eruera always had the strength to be himself, but was too afraid to be that person. So he hid behind the role of his father, but after discovering the big lie he grew up with, he finally understands that he is better than his father because at least he is honest.

Misplacement in Kelly Joseph’s “Transient”

Posted on by leheg100
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Short story: Kelly Joseph – “Transient” (Huia Short Stories 5, 2003)

Belonging and misplacement are well-known feelings, I believe. At some point in life everyone has experienced the sense of being in the right or wrong place, even if it is just at a party or a friend’s house, where you don´t feel comfortable or, on the contrary, almost like being at home. In the context of our seminar Indigenous Literature from New Zealand – Roots and Routes, we read several secondary texts and other works which discuss misplacement in Māori literature. However, one short story was especially fitting in my opinion for this seminar. “Transient”, written by Kelly Joseph, draws connections between the two main topics of roots and routes. The story specifies those concepts by pointing out that roots do not only refer to your origin but also may highlight a sense of misplacement at the same time.

Misplacement was one of the subtopics in our seminar, yet I must admit that, until we read “Transient”, I never really understood the extent of feeling lost or out of place. Kelly Joseph manages to convey the importance of belonging and roots as anchors within three short pages. She describes the journey of a young woman from Taranaki, wandering through the streets of Manhattan. On her way to the Metropolitan Museum, she encounters a homeless man and gives him some change. Inside the museum she wanders around without a map and comes across an empty waka huia. The protagonist cries for the ‘lost treasure’, which is “out of place in this foreign land” (p. 149). After the same homeless man from the beginning hands her a handkerchief, she makes the deliberate decision of booking a one-way ticket home.

When I started reading the short story, I found it quite sombre. As the first-person narrator describes the “thick humidity” and how “oppressive and disorientating” (p. 147) the setting of Manhattan seems, the reader is able to imagine what the protagonist means with the description of being crushed (cf. p. 147). However, the feeling of misplacement is especially noticeable on page 147, when the protagonist acknowledges: “Now I’m lost.” Further into the story, the protagonist emphasizes a lack of belonging or identification in the context of the “displaced objects” which appear “out of place in this foreign land” (p. 149).

As a teen, I always enjoyed trips to museums since they provided new insights to other cultures and historical periods which we did not experience ourselves. However, based on my undergraduate studies and particularly this seminar, I started to understand more and more that exhibiting objects of foreign cultures is an issue worth investigating further. I started to ponder: “Where do these objects come from?”, “Who gave the museum the right to exhibit it and not return it to its rightful place where it belongs?”. Even though these questions are not answered in the short story, it nevertheeless does provide us with enough insights to understand why we should look upon exhibited cultural objects with more care and consideration.

The perception of the protagonist is that the waka huia (like other exhibited objects) is “lost to its people” (p. 149). They belong to the culture of their people and are out of place in the foreign museum in which they are exhibited. This sense of belonging to a community is also highlighted earlier when she says: “[H]omesickness is not just a longing for a place; it’s a yearning for people” (p. 147). She herself feels like she does not belong where she is right now. As the protagonist and a human being, she has the choice of where she locates herself, even though it has taken her several years to realise the necessary actions she must take to feel at home again. The objects in the exhibition do not have the same sort of agency, which might be a reason for her tears when she grieves for the ‘lost objects’.

As I mentioned earlier, a homeless man hands her a handkerchief as she cries in front of the empty waka huia. This emptiness of the cultural object, which traditionally symbolizes relationships, can be seen as a mirror of the protagonist’s feeling of emptiness and misplacement. The homeless man is the only one who acknowledges her crying and takes action to ease her loneliness. Both characters are seen as outsiders to society, which leads to isolation and a lack of interactions with others. This isolation finds relief when the protagonist acknowledges her unwellness in the last sentence: “The following day I book a one-way ticket home.” Since it is a one-way ticket, it is clear that she does not have any intentions of straying too far from her roots any time soon again.

In the light of what I wrote earlier, more specifically the fact that I was not aware of the range which the sense of misplacement could reach, it is remarkable how thoroughly “Transient” points out and highlights the depth of feelings associated with misplacement and still offers me as the reader to interpret the short story based on my own individual experiences. Disorientating, lost, homesickness are all words that I now associate with this short story. Those words remind me that we belong somewhere, even if the process of realising takes us five years, just as the protagonist of Joseph’s story. However, just like the girl from Taranaki, we have the agency to lead our routes back to our roots. Towards the place where we feel like we belong.