Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Whale Rider, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humans and Nature
Maori Identity
Gender and Power
Familial Love
Summary
Analysis
The narrator, 16-year-old Rawiri, learns that his brother Porourangi and sister-in-law Rehua just had a daughter, Kahu. His grandfather Koro Apirana, the chief in their village of Whangara, is distraught. Koro Apirana’s wife, Nanny Flowers, cries and reassures her son on the phone. Koro Apirana takes his rowboat out to the bay, where he broods and pretends not to hear Nanny Flowers shouting to him. She chases him all afternoon in Rawiri’s motorized dinghy.
After exploring the novel’s central ideas from the perspective of Maori tradition and the natural world, Ihimaera now introduces his main characters and the succession crisis that will form the basis for the plot. Koro Apirana’s exaggerated reaction to Kahu’s birth shows how seriously he takes his role as chief, but it also raises the question of whether his traditional beliefs are really compatible with modern gender equality. The narrator, Rawiri, examines this crisis in a relatively objective way because he is neither directly involved in it nor particularly opinionated about it. (He is still young and, like many of his people, still learning about and making sense of his Maori culture.)
Themes
Koro Apirana is angry because in Maori tradition, the chief’s eldest son inherits the title—but it will fall to Kahu unless Porourangi and Rehua have a son. Even eight years later, Koro Apirana and Nanny Flowers are still arguing about Kahu. Nanny Flowers calls herself the household’s real chief and points out that one of her female ancestors was a chief. She half-threatens to divorce Koro Apirana and go live with her ex-boyfriend.
Through Koro Apirana and Nanny Flowers’s argument, Ihimaera asks what it would mean for the Maori to update their traditions. Is traditional Maori patriarchy still desirable, and is it compatible with modern society? Koro Apirana seems to think that, without a male heir, his people will lose their way and maybe even cease to be Maori. In contrast, Nanny Flowers points out that chieftainship is not the same thing as true power in the family and community—which women have always wielded. Her threat of divorce may be empty, but it serves to remind Koro Apirana that she does have some power, even if he refuses to see it.
Themes
