In Tusiata Avia's Bloodclot (2009), Nafanua, Samoan goddess of war, returns to the earth reincarnated as an àfakasi (half-caste) girl from Aranui, a suburb in Christchurch's ‘gangland’. Nafanua sits outside the New World supermarket as her friends contemplate robbing it. Rather than joining them, Nafanua in ‘her Triumph’ leaves this known world behind. However, before doing so, she enacts a culturally specific Samoan practice by covering the car's mirrors. This ritual is based on the pre-colonial belief that uncovered sources of reflection at night are transformed into portals through which spirits may become visible and draw the living into the realm of the dead. Nafanua's act is a defensive one, intended to protect her soul. Covering the mirrors, then, symbolises an actively selective, protective way of seeing.

My own selective seeing was adopted while writing a PhD on Pacific literature in order to protect myself from the view of such writing as a second-rate parody of English literature. The struggle of Pacific literature for recognition – or cultural space – in New Zealand reaches back to the early 1970s and the literary arrival of Albert Wendt. That struggle continues even within the more multicultural Aotearoa-New Zealand emerging since the 1980s. Pacific youth, one of the fastest-growing demographics in this nation, still lack ‘literary mirrors’, even in the classroom, to encourage acts of personal, cultural, and national identity making. A lack of literary criticism written specifically from a Pasifika perspective that might provide broader models for reading the literature also remains.

In spite of important critical work from Wendt and Palagi (European) critics like Paul Sharrad, there is still a blind spot in mainstream critical engagement with Pacific literature: as a ‘migrant’ literature, it remains on the outskirts of the New Zealand literary tradition from which it is viewed and judged. This chapter argues for a culturally based aesthetic to address this blindness by pursuing ‘aesthetic sovereignty … the right and ability of peoples to define their own aesthetic standards and to determine how those aesthetic standards may fulfil and articulate the goals of their communities’.