Written by David Eggleton.
Dreams were the holy ground from which your ancestors could stand and direct your life, introduce you to visions, symbolic pictures of places, caves, faces, animals, insects; also where they cry and lament, laugh and run, bring rain and storms, set canoes adrift, destroy gardens and homes, take children, leave messages in stone.
In Mark Cross's painting Coma of the Human Spirit, John Pule stands on the coral shore of Niue Island, quill in hand, attentively observing sleeping children wrapped in mosquito nets. Like vague forms in chrysalises, they have still to awaken and become transformed. John Pule, Niuean-born New Zealand poet, painter, novelist has been transformed-undergoing a personal metamorphosis from marginalised, alienated urban Pacific Islander stereotype, to become a visionary in his own time. He's one of those artists who is larger than the sum of social conventions-and in New Zealand, a place where it sometimes seems the sun has never set on the last remaining rump of the British Empire, those conventions include a sizeable colonial mind-set hangover. Witness media profiles such as the Listener (20 October 2000) which selectively quote Pule so as to patronise whilst seeming to promote.
