A Literary Anaysis of Patricia Grace's "letters from Whetu"

Literary Analysis of Patricia Grace’s “Letters from Whetu”

Abby Judge

GNED 1401 – 035

December 11th, 2017

Mount Royal University

Instructor: W Mark Giles

Introduction

Patricia Grace’s short story, Letters from Whetu is a moving, coming of age short story from the 1980’s of a young Maori woman. Portrayed through letters, this story recalls journeys through time with Whetu and her friends, as any normal teenager would do. This story also calls attention to the issue of identity, not only her identity as a young woman coming of age in a society, who faces multiple challenges to “grow up” in the person Whetu is pressured to be. But this story also shows us some struggles that come to the Maori people and how identity is a tough subject for the native New Zealanders. In this paper, I will be discussing how this short story, in the form of epistolary (letters), creates an understanding of the identity of Whetu and her friends.

Description

Patricia Grace writes a story called Letters from Whetu, in which a Maori girl by the name of Whetu sends four letters to her friends during the school day while in English, geography, mathematics, and history class. In English, Whetu writes to her friend Lenny whom she jokes with. In geography, she writes to a best friend Ani, revealing secrets. In math class, Whetu writes to a boy named Iosefa, who is considered “part of the gang”. Lastly, she writes to Andy, who left school to work, Whetu admires Andy very much, almost as a crush. Each letter that Whetu sends has a different voice or style. Whetu writes these letters to discuss nostalgic feelings and memories as well as express anxiety towards accrediting day, which involves standardized tests like most high schools have here in Canada. Whetu compares accrediting day to a thriller story where “deciding day” is when people live or die based on their health physically and mentally. Whetu is extremely smart, which is evident in many factors in the story.

Whetu continuously brings up a memory of “last Sunday” which she shared with all four friends. This event creates somewhat of a timeline for the story when all four friends met up, took the train out on a limb and enjoyed a night at the beach on a cliff and watched the sun go down while singing songs. Whetu plans to send all four letters through the mail to her friends even though she goes to school with Iosefa, Ani, and Lenny. Andy, however, left to work at a sheep abattoir, so he will receive the letter without talking to Whetu first. In the following paragraphs, I will be explaining how each letter to each friend has a different “style” or “voice” because she knows what she can say and how she can say it to each person. The different voices are also used by Patricia Grace in the character of Whetu to create a different identity for each person, including Whetu. Whetu’s identity is seen in every letter, she shows the readers her regular teenage anxieties and her identity as a young woman, but she also shows us her identity as a Maori person.

Analysis and Interpretation

          The first letter Whetu wrote was in English class to her friend Lenny. Whetu’s voice and writing style towards Lenny, like all the letter, is a casual, sort of low writing style because she is writing to her everyday friend. From my reading of this short story, Lenny is a boy who shares a friendship with Whetu along with the rest of the “gang”. Although Whetu complains about accrediting day, while telling Lenny her analogy of the connections to “deciding day”, and shares the memory of last Sunday with him, Whetu seems to be friendly and familiar with Lenny but not intimate. Lenny is still someone she can trust though, while she complains about her problems and the English teacher she goes into great detail about her issues, knowing Lenny probably will not go around flapping his mouth to others. In her letter, Whetu suggests that he and herself should save up for a surfboard, and they should bring food next time they all go to the beach. Whetu jokes around with Lenny meaning he is a comfortable person to be around. Lenny seems to be a good friend of Whetu’s, along with the rest of the friend circle. The familiarity between Whetu and Lenny shows that he has been a friend for a while, perhaps since childhood.

         The second letter Whetu wrote, was to her best friend Ani. It is obvious to see the two girls’ close friendship and intimacy in little things in the letter such as when Whetu signs off on the letter with the words “much love”. Whetu shares secrets throughout this letter with Ani such as when she talks about the sun setting, and goes on to relating this to someone shooting someone else in the head, a darker side of Whetu whom Ani sees the most of as her best friend. This proves that Ani is very trustworthy and she listens. Whetu also shares memories with Ani, which represents that she too, is part of the group. It is obvious to also see Whetu’s compassion in the letter to Ani and she comforts her about her fears, when the gang went to the large ledge over the ocean to watch the sunset. Ani was afraid of heights but Whetu helped her best friend through it.

              Written to Iosefa in geography class, the third letter is, in my opinion, the most differing from the others in the sense of voice and style. Iosefa is made for us readers to imagine him as somewhat shy and collected. Whetu shares nostalgic feelings with him as he is an important connection to the past. However, Whetu seems to be keeping some sort of distance from Sef as she does not tell him deep dark secrets as she did to Ani. Though Whetu talks about the day at the beach in every letter, she keeps the mentioning of this event quite brief in her letter to Sef. The reasoning behind this is the most obvious in the following letter to Andy, the reader discovers that Sef’s house in not a safe place, where Sef receives hits because of bad behaviour.  Through the reading of this short story, Whetu makes some comments to Andy such as “Iosefa has got a black eye” and “Iosefa got thumped by his old man”. Whetu is very smart, as I have mentioned before and she knows what she can and can not say to certain people, Whetu keeps the mention of the beach brief because in a way she wants to protect Sef, whom she cares about a lot, from getting hit again.

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