The Male Gaze and Objectification of Indigenous Women in Poukahangatus
The Thematic Claim
In Poukahangatus, Tayi Tibble examines how Māori women are seen—and how they see themselves—under a white male gaze that reduces their bodies, hair, and skin to exotic commodities. The collection argues that this gaze is not a neutral act of looking but a form of colonial violence with deep historical roots, from the Waikato Wars to mid-century tourism advertising. Yet Tibble refuses to leave her speakers as passive victims. Across the poems, women reclaim agency through defiance, self-definition, and even tactical performance—cutting their own hair, developing protective crushes, and asking pointed questions about who gets to navigate and who gets to be seen.
The Gaze as Surveyor and Commodity
The most explicit scene of objectification appears in the opening poem, “Poūkahangatus,” when a man in a Wellington hotel room runs his hands through the narrator’s hair “like a surveyor.” The word choice is deliberate: a surveyor measures and maps land, treating it as territory to be claimed. The man is surprised to learn the hair is not dyed, groans that he has never seen hair that black before, and the narrator understands that what he really means is skin. The poem then exposes the racial logic beneath his desire: he admits he does not typically sleep with minority races but still wants to sleep with her. This is the male gaze in its rawest form—a desire that simultaneously acknowledges and denies the woman’s humanity, treating her as an exception to a rule that still governs how she is seen.
The narrator’s response is telling. She wishes her hair were “a crown of snakes,” but it is not enough to make her leave. Her mouth forms an O that looks like yes rather than no. This is not a simple scene of victimization; it is a scene of complicity, ambivalence, and the difficulty of saying no when the gaze has already defined you as someone who says yes. Tibble does not let her speaker off the hook, nor does she let the reader pretend that resistance is easy.
The nana’s beauty operates on a similar register. She is described as “a wallflower, but a flower nonetheless,” meaning she is always being looked at “at her expense.” Her beauty is the kind that “makes men crash cars, abandon wives and launch ships.” The phrase “at her expense” is crucial: the looking is not a compliment but a cost. The nana’s beauty is a burden she did not choose, and the men who crash cars and abandon wives are not admirers but agents of disruption in her life.
The poem also connects this personal experience of the gaze to broader structures of representation. The narrator notes she was born in 1995, the year Disney released Pocahontas, and that the real Pocahontas went with John Smith to England, caught a disease, and died. The line “Representation is important” is repeated with bitter irony—the Disney version erases the real woman’s death, just as the hotel room man erases the narrator’s humanity. Similarly, Nicole Scherzinger is named as the only Pacific Islander the narrator ever saw on TV, a figure she and her classmates imitate in maths class, swinging their chairs and untying their hair. The imitation is both a performance of the gaze and a way of claiming visibility in a culture that offers so few models.
Historical Patterns of Objectification
The gaze is not new. In “In the 1960s an Influx of Māori Women,” Tibble traces the same dynamics in an earlier generation. The women who move to Tinakori Road wear printed mini dresses and buy makeup at Elizabeth Arden “in the shade too-pale-pink”—a detail that captures how the beauty industry itself is calibrated to white standards. They hide vodka and dirty magazines in a spare basement refrigerator, small acts of private rebellion against the domestic roles they are expected to perform. They smile at wives who refuse to kiss their cheeks, order desserts they never eat, and eat white bread in the dark kitchen instead. The poem ends with a devastating image: they imagine drowning in the bathtub, then resurface and repeat the routine. The bathtub becomes a site of imagined escape and enforced return—the women cannot drown, cannot leave, cannot break the cycle. Their interior lives remain invisible beneath the performance of domestic contentment.
The poem “Assimilation” makes the historical stakes explicit. A modern couple splits bills and chores evenly, but when the husband leaves the pegs on the ground, the wife thinks about potatoes and muskets, disease-ridden blankets, surveyors and preachers, and how many Māori girls ended up on their knees to build the modern nation. The pegs in the mud become a symbol of the unacknowledged labor—and the unacknowledged violence—that built the nation. The wife’s sigh and eye roll are “like a tiny haka,” a small act of defiance that refuses to let the history be forgotten. The poem’s final image—plunging the pegs back into “the earth’s dark wet cunt”—is a reclamation of power, a refusal to clean up after the man who leaves his mess behind.
Reclaiming Agency Through Defiance and Self-Definition
Against this backdrop of objectification, Tibble’s speakers find ways to resist. The great-grandmother who cuts off her own thick plait with blunt scissors is the collection’s founding act of self-determination. The narrator finds the preserved plait after her death and holds it to her throat, “like Cleopatra deciding not to wait for the Romans.” The comparison is significant: Cleopatra chose her own death rather than be paraded as a captive. The great-grandmother’s haircut is a similar act of refusal—she will not let her hair, and by extension her body, be the object of someone else’s gaze.
The Medusa reframing continues this project. Medusa, the narrator insists, was “a master carver, engraving her existence in bone forever.” The snakes in her hair are not monstrous but a response to a society that “constantly hisses at you.” The narrator’s wish for a crown of snakes in the hotel room is a wish for the power to turn the gazer to stone—to freeze the man who sees her as a commodity and make him see her as a person, or at least to make him suffer for his looking.
The narrator’s decision to “tactically develop a crush on Hone Harawira” is another form of resistance. She rebrands herself as a Black Panther, wearing turtlenecks and aviators, learning the words “Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou” (“We will fight”). The crush is not romantic but protective—a way of claiming a Māori man’s gaze as a shield against the white male gaze. It is a tactical performance, a deliberate use of identity as armor.
The sister’s hair is the final site of struggle. Everyone talks about the seventeen-year-old’s hair to the point that it causes her anxiety. She wants a trim but must negotiate her colonial guilt with her ancestors first. The narrator, as the eldest, decides to do them both a favour and cut it while she is sleeping. This is a violent act, but it is also an act of love and liberation—a way of freeing the sister from the burden of being looked at, of being defined by her hair. The narrator claims to inherit the most mana and uses it to cut through the cycle of objectification.
Complexity and Contradiction
Tibble does not offer easy resolutions. The narrator in the hotel room does not leave. The women in the 1960s resurface and repeat. The speaker in “Red American Mustang” seems to embrace the stereotype, calling herself “a dangerous native” and “your tiny dashboard dancer... keeping your eyes off the road.” The poem’s tone is ironic and self-aware, but it also registers the seduction of being desired, even when the desire is based on a fantasy. The speaker in “Identity Politics” buys a Mana Party T-shirt from AliExpress, wears it as a dress with thigh-high vinyl boots, and posts it to Instagram, asking “Am I navigating correctly?” She looks to Rihanna and Kim Kardashian for reference, searches through archives of South Pacific tourism advertisements, and acknowledges that her lineage does not trace to the southern artisans who made pounamu amulets. The poem is full of ambivalence: the speaker participates in the commodification of her own identity even as she questions it. The “greatest failed marriage” of February 6th—the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi—is invoked as a national wound, but the speaker’s response is to arrive “fashionably late,” a gesture that is both defiant and resigned.
These contradictions are the point. Tibble shows that the male gaze is not something women can simply refuse; it is a structure that shapes desire, self-image, and even resistance. The women in these poems are neither pure victims nor pure heroes. They are people navigating a world that sees them as objects, and their strategies—cutting hair, developing crushes, performing for Instagram—are partial, messy, and human.
Character and Symbol Connections
The narrator is the central figure through whom the gaze is experienced and resisted. Her nana represents the generational inheritance of being looked at; the great-grandmother represents the possibility of refusal; the sister represents the next generation still struggling with the same burden. The mother in “Hawaiki” is exhausted from pregnancy and the demands of living, naming her last son after the paradise of origin—a reminder that the women in this collection are also mothers, carrying the weight of the past into the future.
The symbols reinforce these connections. Hair is the most charged symbol: it is fetishized by the hotel room man, straightened by the narrator, cut by the great-grandmother, and anxiously discussed by the sister. The ocean represents both the origin (the ancestors’ crossing) and the possibility of escape (the women who think about drowning). The bathtub is a domestic version of the ocean—a place where the women imagine drowning but resurface. The whale, mentioned in “Hawaiki” as a means of arrival, connects the present to the ancestral past.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does Tibble use the hotel room scene in “Poūkahangatus” to expose the racial logic of the male gaze?
The scene shows a man who runs his hands through the narrator’s hair “like a surveyor,” treating her body as territory to be mapped and claimed. His surprise that the hair is not dyed and his comment that he has never seen hair that black before reveal that his desire is based on racial difference, not on the narrator as a person. His admission that he does not typically sleep with minority races but still wants to sleep with her makes the logic explicit: he sees her as an exception to his usual avoidance of racialized others, but the exception is still framed by the rule. The narrator’s wish for a crown of snakes and her mouth that looks like yes rather than no show both her desire for power and her complicity in the scene.
2. What role does the nana’s beauty play in the collection’s exploration of the gaze?
The nana’s beauty is described as the kind that “makes men crash cars, abandon wives and launch ships.” She is “a wallflower, but a flower nonetheless,” meaning she is always being looked at “at her expense.” The phrase captures the cost of being seen: the nana does not choose her beauty, but it subjects her to constant attention that disrupts her life and the lives of others. Her beauty is a form of objectification that she cannot escape, and the narrator’s description of it as dizzying and terrifying suggests the violence inherent in being so visible.
3. How does the poem “In the 1960s an Influx of Māori Women” connect domestic routine to the theme of objectification?
The poem shows women performing domestic roles—dusting ashtrays, buying makeup, going out to dinner with their husbands—while hiding vodka and dirty magazines in a spare refrigerator. The makeup “in the shade too-pale-pink” symbolizes the pressure to conform to white beauty standards. The women smile at wives who refuse to kiss their cheeks and order desserts they never eat, eating white bread in the dark kitchen instead. The final image of imagining drowning in the bathtub and then resurfacing to repeat the routine captures the cycle of performance and suppression that defines their lives. The objectification is not just sexual; it is domestic, economic, and social.
4. What does the narrator’s decision to cut her sister’s hair while she sleeps reveal about agency and resistance?
The sister’s hair causes her anxiety because everyone talks about it, and she wants a trim but must negotiate her colonial guilt with her ancestors first. The narrator, as the eldest, claims to inherit the most mana and decides to cut the hair while the sister sleeps. The act is both violent and liberating: it takes away the sister’s agency in the moment, but it also frees her from the burden of being defined by her hair. The narrator’s claim of mana suggests that she is acting not just for herself but for the family and the ancestors, cutting through the cycle of objectification that has affected generations of women.
5. How does “Identity Politics” complicate the theme of reclaiming agency?
The speaker buys a Mana Party T-shirt from AliExpress, wears it as a dress, and posts it to Instagram, asking “Am I navigating correctly?” She looks to Rihanna and Kim Kardashian for reference, searches through tourism advertisements, and acknowledges that her lineage does not trace to the southern artisans who made pounamu amulets. The poem shows the speaker participating in the commodification of her own identity—wearing a political slogan as fashion, posting it for likes—even as she questions whether she is doing it right. The “greatest failed marriage” of February 6th is invoked as a national wound, but the speaker’s response is to arrive “fashionably late.” The poem suggests that reclaiming agency is not a clean or simple process; it is entangled with the very systems of commodification it seeks to resist.